Been playing with retraction, temperatures, feedrates and NinjaFlex. Managing to get really clean prints now which is a big improvement over the stringy messy prints one would normally expext in a flexible material. These pictures are straight off the printer, no clean up done.
Its not perfect as there are still some small blobs to battle with, but it’s encouraging. I’m also really impressed by the bridging on this stuff, I expected it to be pretty tragic but its actually very nice. Especially as this was printed over a 75c glass heated bed with no print fan to tighten up the bridges.
Emmets dodeca chain, scaled up 150% and cut down to just 3 links. Mendel90 with an E3Dv6 printing grass green ninjaflex. 223c nozzle / 75c bed. 1.3mm retraction at 75mm/s. 20mm/s print speed for all parts of the print. 150mm/s travel speed. Cura.
With @Joshua_Rowley
Just using my work phone to upload stuff. My original gplus account was my personal one and linked to my own phone. Gotta draw that work/personal line somewhere. Although that gets a bit muddy when your job is your hobby and you drive into work on a Sunday because you can’t wait til Monday to see how your print turned out!
I have very good results with almost the same settings and also an E3D hotend. My settings are: hotend temp 225, heated bed 60, retraction 1 mm and 60 mm/s and speed 30 mm/s also using Cura. I have tried with black Ninjaflex.
1.75 or 3mm? I’ve got a strong feeling that most of the challenges with flexible filament are harder to work around with 1.75mm.
I´ve only used 3mm so far, but I have plans to try it with my other printer with 1.75 mm, so maybe that would be harder…
What extruder do you guys use for NinjaFlex?
I drilled out a Greg’s (Wade’s) and placed a 3mm ID ptfe sleeve in it, notched for the Hobbes bolt. Works great.
This was done with 1.75mm filament, which is half the challenge! 3mm flexible is pretty easy stuff to deal with in comparison.
We’re using a standard wades extruder, with some mods to add more constraint and guidance to the filament.
The last word in the post, Cura, seems to be the most important. I got much more successful ninjaflex prints on my first attempt with Cura than the best I was able to get with Slic3r.
Yeah the path planning really really helps with not giving it a chance to ooze everywhere. I never even tried slic3r with flexibles as the path planning isn’t good enough for this type of print.
The excessive number of retractions also greatly increases the failure rate.
Retraction was a big issue to begin with, but we seem to have that sussed now with good confinement and constraint on the filament. We managed to print the cellular lamp with pretty aggressive retraction around once every second or more for 8 hours. Once we had reliable effective retraction sorted the rest was standard printer tuning, just a bit odd because everything is so squishy!
I used those settings on a Flashforge Creator X (with a modified filament guide) using NinjaFlex and I got a great print, thanks for posting this.
