Has anyone had any experience printing with plain TPE? I got a spool of it quite cheap and although I can get it to print quite well, it simply refuses to stick to the bed. Tried the bed hot, cold, bare glass, PVA, glue stick - nothing will make it stick it just comes right back off. Any ideas?
What exactly is “plain TPE”?
Thermoplastic Elastomer. It’s what Ninjaflex is based on.
@Phil_Evans NinjaFlex isn’t “based” on anything. It’s just high quality TPE that they sell at a high price. It’s like a genuine Arduino vs. an eBay clone.
Okay then. “non-branded” TPE.
Hmm… I only got Ninjaflex to print successfully once (not for this reason, my roll got moisture damage after its first use) using regular PLA temp settings (extruder 200C, bed 70C) on sanded blue tape with some hairspray, at 30mm/s.
But what printer do you have?
Thermoplastic Elastomer doesn’t specify much about the plastic, other than the fact that it’s a) flexible/soft and b) softens and melts at a certain temperature. Some of them might kill you if you process them incorrectly, others won’t be particularly soft.
There’s six rough groups of TPEs, and each of them contains an unlimited number of sub-varieties.
As @Thomas_Sanladerer says, TPE is just a name for any polymer resin that is elastic. It says nothing about its chemical composition.
For example, NinjaFlex is a Thermoplastic Polyurethane, as is FilaFlex. Where as there are also flexible PLA filaments, and flexible copolyesters. Taulman also has PCTPE which is an elastomer-polyamide copolymer. These are all TPE, but all distinctly different polymers with large differences in how they are processed.
Ditto what everyone else said.
Also, did you try blue tape? Works really well for ninjaflex.
I print Ninjaflex on glass with hairspray. I usually heat it a little but I don’t its probably necessary. Sticks really well.
FormaFutura Flex PLA sticks great to PEI heat bed surface. Not knowing this nondescript material, it’s still worth a try, and it’s worked great for all the materials I’ve tried yet.
Filaflex will stick to glass without heat, hairspray or tape. That is one of it’s defining properties.
We build with Ninjaflex all the time. It sticks quite well to bare PE tape, room temp.