MakerBot Method & Method X
Zero to reliably printing, in order. Tick the boxes as you go — the page remembers where you stopped.
Almost everything here was worked out and documented by Vince at Mastering The Method, who prints commercially on a Method X. This page reorganizes his findings into a checklist — it is not a substitute for the videos, and he deserves the subscribe. Sources ↓
MakerBot ships this printer with a brush. That is not enough to maintain it. None of this is exotic or expensive, and the whole kit costs a fraction of one wasted spool. Everything marked REQUIRED is used in the routine you'll run before every print.
Wear eye protection whenever a wire brush is spinning. Never exceed 10,000 RPM on the stainless brushes — above that the bristles flare from centrifugal force, stop cutting, and start coming out.
Everything downstream assumes calibration completes. If it doesn't, no slicer setting, no drying cycle and no plate prep will help — the problem is physical geometry. So test this before you invest time anywhere else.
Go to Settings → Calibrate Extruders, then Assisted Leveling. Let both run to completion.
While assisted leveling runs, watch the two extruders as they move. You are looking for one specific thing: does extruder 2 hang noticeably lower than extruder 1?
There is a documented factory assembly defect behind most of these. Take the cover off the extruder and look at where the hot end meets its metal mounting bracket, then compare against your other extruders side by side.
When the factory misses those locating features, the hot end sits crooked and slightly low. The printer correctly refuses to calibrate an extruder whose tip is not where it should be.
The fix is a disassembly: remove the nozzle, free the hot end from the bracket, seat the three metal nipples into their three indentations so the hot end sits square and flush, check no wires are pinched, and reassemble.
Ultimaker followed up directly with the operator who first documented this, so it is a recognised QC issue rather than one bad unit. If your printer is still in warranty, this is a support conversation, not a teardown. Opening it up yourself is the move only when support isn't an option.
Your slicer's stock profile is not a conservative starting point, and it is presented as though it were tested. This is where a lot of the Method's bad reputation actually comes from. Read your own numbers first, then pick one of the two paths below.
MakerBot CloudPrint was retired on 1 October 2025 and shut down entirely that December. The Method series now slices in UltiMaker Cura — the desktop app, or the browser version built into Digital Factory — and queues jobs through UltiMaker Digital Factory.
Printers were not carried across automatically. If yours has sat idle since the shutdown you have to reconnect it to Digital Factory by hand before it will accept a job at all. A Method that suddenly stopped receiving prints is an account problem, not a hardware fault — check this before you touch anything mechanical.
In Cura, type speed into the settings search box and read the values your profile is actually using. Speed is expressed in millimetres per second. For scale, CloudPrint’s stock “Balanced” profile — what most Method owners printed on for years — shipped these:
Sparse infill crosses the whole bed in under two seconds. Cura ships UltiMaker’s own Method profiles, so your numbers will not match these line for line — which is the whole reason you read yours instead of trusting a figure off a web page. The question is not whether they equal the values above, it is whether anything is being asked to move fast on a printer that is not keeping up.
Free, tedious, and effective. Search speed and set every speed value to 10 mm/s as a floor. Print successfully at that floor, then raise values in 5–10% increments, one group at a time, until quality degrades — then back off one step.
It is genuinely dozens of settings and many have no tooltip. Budget the time honestly.
This is what the operators who print commercially on the Method use. Roughly $200, with a two-week fully unrestricted trial — so you can answer the question empirically before paying anything.
Its speed model is simpler and safer by default: one default printing speed in mm per minute, with everything else expressed as a percentage of it. Ships at 1800 mm/min; 2500 is a reported comfortable working value.
What it buys beyond sane defaults:
That last row is the highest-value single setting in either slicer. Let layer one go slow and the rest can go fast.
Wet filament is the largest single cause of Method failures, and it is routinely misdiagnosed as a retraction-settings problem. Your printer already measures it — each filament bay has a humidity sensor, reported on the touchscreen only. There is nothing to see or reach inside the bay; it is a number on a screen, and it is buried well enough that most owners never read it. Start a drying cycle now; it runs while you do everything else.
Go to Settings → System Settings → Sensor Info, then scroll until you reach the filament bays. Record the number for each bay.
Sensor Info opens on the tool heads. The first thing you see is two blocks headed A/1 and B/2, and because the Method pairs bay 1 with extruder A and bay 2 with extruder B, those read exactly like “bay 1 and bay 2”. They are not. They are the extruders — the giveaway is fields like ENCODER TICKS and GRADIENT FAN RPM, which no filament bay has.
The bays are at the very bottom of the list. Keep scrolling past the tool heads. Vince, on his own machine: “it’s on the bottom of the sensor screen — it starts at tool heads and then you just scroll down and you’ll see filament bays coming up right there.”
There is a refresh button; the value is stale until you press it. And older firmware put all of this under Settings → Advanced, which was renamed System Settings — if you are following a CloudPrint-era video, that is the rename you are tripping over.
That is ambient room humidity. The bays are sealed, but sealing is all they do — the drying is entirely down to the desiccant inside. A bay sitting at room humidity has no desiccant, or desiccant that saturated months ago, and it has been storing your filament in room air the whole time. Saturated desiccant is worse than none: it turns the bay into a humidifier.
Fix it while you dry, not before — the spools sit on the build plate during a cycle, so charge the bays the moment they are empty and they spend the whole run recovering. Do not wait for the bay to come down before starting: waiting does nothing for the filament. Just do not dry a spool and hand it back to a bay that is still at room humidity — that is three days for nothing.
This is the step that makes the bay a dry box instead of a sealed box, and it is the one nobody mentions. In Vince’s words: “these bays are airtight, but without desiccant you’re not going to get rid of the humidity within the bay.”
Two large packs per bay — the 76 g ones that ship with genuine MakerBot spools, not the sachets that come in a shoe box. He has driven a bay down to 1% RH this way. If your packs are old, regenerate them in the oven first; a saturated pack does nothing.
Packs that size will foul the bay during a job. Put a sticky note on each bay door. This is Vince’s own workaround and it exists because the mistake is easy and expensive.
Unload the filament, clear the build plate, then Settings → System Settings → Dry Material and select your material — it carries preset times and temperatures.
The wizard asks you to seal the spool in its metallised bag. Don't. Put the bare spool on the build plate with large desiccant packs around and on top of it. The heat reaches the filament directly instead of being blocked by the bag, and it dries faster.
Dry more than one spool at once. Everything in the chamber reaches chamber temperature, so bare spools sitting side by side on the plate all dry together. Every preset is capped at the same 70 °C, so running a mixed load on the longest material’s preset costs the others nothing — and PVA in particular wants all the heat it can get. One long run beats two serial ones.
The 70 °C ceiling is a firmware limit, not a hardware one. Simplify3D’s machine control panel writes chamber temperature directly and ignores it — set the temperature type to heated build platform and save it as its own profile.
Vince runs 110 °C for an hour or two, then drops to 90 °C and lets it coast; he calls it the reverse pyramid. For nylon-CF this turns a three-day soak into hours. You can also lower the build plate on the Z axis and stack several spools, which makes the whole printer a filament dryer.
The bay reading does not answer this. It measures the air, not the water already inside the plastic — “do not confuse that reading with the humidity in your filament, that’s two different things.” Vince has had wet PVA in a single-digit bay, and printed cleanly with a bay at 10%. You need a direct test.
The break test. Purge the extruder and let the full cycle run — do not cut it short to save filament. Then hit confirm and watch the strand:
A clean purge should be smooth and concentric the whole way through. Bubbles anywhere mean moisture all the way through. This is also why the purge tower is worth watching on a real print: if the printer cannot lay down a clean little box, the geometry that follows will not be better.
Dry every spool the day it arrives. New filament is not dry filament — nobody knows how long it sat unbagged after extrusion, including the manufacturer.
Put the bay desiccant on a calendar, not on a symptom. Saturated desiccant turns the material bay into a humidifier.
Treat soluble supports as the canary. PVA and SR-30 are the most hygroscopic things in the machine and degrade first. If your failures cluster on jobs that use soluble support, you have found your cause without looking further.
This is the part that actually separates a reliable Method from an unreliable one, and almost none of it is in MakerBot's documentation. Ten minutes, in this order, every time. Tick as you go.
Calibrate with the plate in exactly the state it will print in — glue applied and smoothed. Calibrating on a bare plate and adding glue afterwards puts a layer of unmeasured material under the nozzle and throws away the tolerance you just measured.
Everything above is ordered by what commonly bites Method owners in general. It is not ordered by what bites yours — nobody knows that yet. Two cheap experiments fix that, and they're worth more than any further tuning.
Run a stock benchmark — a Benchy, or MakerBot's own calibration part — in a stock profile, on the material you normally use. One print partitions the entire problem space:
This is the highest-information print you can make, and it's what stops you disassembling an extruder to fix what was a support-strategy problem.
Nothing on this printer records why a print failed, which is exactly what makes the failure rate feel random. One row per job:
| Field | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|
| date · file | Identifies repeat offenders |
| material · spool | Isolates a single bad spool from a bad profile |
| bay RH % | Tests the moisture hypothesis directly |
| extruder · hours | Catches a tip past service life |
| outcome · error code | The obvious one |
| layer/height at failure | The most valuable field on the sheet |
| photo | Failure mode is unrecoverable from memory a week later |
One derived number does most of the work: what fraction of failures happen in the first five layers. Front-loaded failures are adhesion and calibration — Parts 1 and 4. Failures scattered through the print are extrusion and material — Parts 2, 3 and 6. Those have disjoint cures, and conflating them is how this stays unsolved for months.
For these ten jobs, resist fixing several things at once. Confounded data is the reason the same problem keeps coming back.
Maintenance on this machine should be calendar-driven, not event-driven. Waiting until something visibly fails is how a ten-minute job becomes a two-hour one — cooked filament on a hot end sets like iron.
| Interval | Task |
|---|---|
| Every print | The Part 4 ritual |
| ~40 print hours | Pull and deep-clean the nozzle; clean the hot-end block |
| Fixed calendar | Dry or replace material-bay desiccant |
| Before long jobs | Check remaining extruder life against your written threshold |
| On arrival | Dry every new spool |
Release the T9 set screw, pop the nozzle out with the tool bundled with your extruder. Chuck it in a drill on a light clutch setting so it slips, and hold a Scotch-Brite red pad against it at low speed.
The tube with the small "butterfly wings" at its end is factory-set to a specific depth inside the nozzle. Pull it out and you will not get that depth back. Clean the nozzle with the tube still in it.
Clean the back of the nozzle too — buildup there changes how deeply it seats, which changes your Z. Clean the hot-end block with the round brush; caked filament there ruins heat conduction.
Light pressure throughout. Press hard and the friction heat melts filament back onto the part you're cleaning.
Method extruders are consumables. Cleaning does not reset wear. A tip past its service life underextrudes and grinds no matter how immaculate it looks — and that failure resembles nearly everything else on this page.
Write down a replacement threshold in hours and check it before starting any long job, rather than running until it visibly fails mid-print.
Match the symptom, go to the step. If two rows match, work the earlier part first.
Nearly everything here comes from Mastering The Method — one operator, Vince, who prints commercially on a Method X and documents the machine at a level MakerBot never did. 34 videos, mostly 100–1,000 views, which is why none of it surfaces in a normal search.
If a step above is unclear, the video behind it will show you the physical motion in a way text can't. Read means I worked from the full transcript; the rest I catalogued but didn't read.
Two of these were recorded in CloudPrint, which no longer exists. The reasoning in them still holds — what a speed setting does to a print has not changed — but the interface on screen will not match what you see in Cura. Watch them for the why, not for where the buttons are.
| Backs | Video | Length | Read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Part 4 | The Assisted Leveling Calibration — solution to trouble printing | 69 min | ✓ |
| Part 2.2B | The Method and Simplify3D 5.1 performing as it should | 33 min | ✓ |
| Part 6.1 | How to restore the Method's nozzle to new condition | 18 min | ✓ |
| Part 6.1 | How to restore the Method's hot end to new condition | 21 min | ✓ |
| Part 1.2 | Fix Error 1032 — assisted leveling / calibration failed | 9 min | ✓ |
| Part 3 | The Method drying process explained with hygrometer sensor | 17 min | ✓ |
| Part 2.1 | CloudPrint settings new users need to understand | 14 min | ✓ |
| Part 2 | CloudPrint vs Simplify3D 5.1 — direct print comparison | 14 min | ✓ |
| Part 2.2B | Increasing the Method's print speed by 39% (2500 mm/min) | 23 min | — |
| Part 3 | Using Simplify's chamber control for optimal filament drying | 5 min | — |
| Part 3 | When to run a drying cycle on the Method's PVA (parts 1 & 2) | 22 min | ✓ |
| Part 3.3 | How to dry filament at up to 110 °C with the Method | 19 min | ✓ |
| — | ABS-R and Rapid Rinse support combo print settings | 25 min | — |
| — | How to convert Method's extruders 1XA to 2XA | 14 min | — |
| — | Extend the Method's X-axis build volume 25% (single extruder) | 11 min | — |
| — | Printing PVA rafts with Simplify3D, with settings | 12 min | — |
The remaining videos cover BuildTak sheet as a stock build-plate replacement, small-part printing settings, and Simplify3D's machine control panel.
This is a single operator's experience, largely on nylon-CF and PETG on a Method X. It's empirical and specific, which is its value — but it is not a manufacturer spec, and it hasn't been cross-checked against a second operator. Treat the numbers as calibrated starting points.