About to run out of filament on a print… Should I pause to reload or manually push in new filament when the end reaches the extruder ?
I pause to reload. Never had luck pushing in a new strand and having it feed without problem through the bowden tube and all the way to the melt zone. Better to home XY and extrude the new filament by hand to make sure its feeding properly. Then reengage the idler, clean off the nozzle, and resume.
Pause, move in Z, retract, feed new filament, resume.
$^&* that sucks, pressed restart instead of resume !
too bad you weren’t printing from SD.
Well, using Octoprint, but no way to know where it was at. Oh well, print is restarted now on a new spool…
Another option: heat fuse the new filament to the end of the old. Just have to make sure there’s no blob that will jam the extruder.
Personally I’ve never had a problem just feeding new filament after the old, but I’m not using a bowden tube.
I wonder if there’s demand for a filament splicer…
@Jim_Wygralak Yup.
For my printer it is better to pause and reload. When I pause I have to move the head away from the job quickly otherwise i get a bit of a blob on the job that can cause issues when you restart.