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.
CloudPrint's stock "Balanced" 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. Pick one of the two paths below.
In CloudPrint, type speed into the settings search box. These are the stock values — note that CloudPrint expresses speed in millimetres per second:
Sparse infill crosses the whole bed in under two seconds.
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 — there is a humidity sensor in each filament bay that most owners never open. Start a drying cycle now; it runs while you do everything else.
Go to Settings → Advanced → Sensor Info and scroll to the filament bays. Record the number for each bay.
Unload the filament, clear the build plate, then Settings → Advanced → 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 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.
| 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 | — |
| — | 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, a drying-at-110 °C workaround, 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.