I am thinking I need to do something about the resistance my EZ-struder cold end is getting when trying to push filament. Would oiling the tube do any good? I think a bit of the resistance is in the bowden tube. As a result, my hobbed pulley ends up grinding the filament some and so I get under-extrusion.
I skimmed through your post history, can’t find what hot end you’re using? “Seasoning” all-metal hot ends works, but if you’ve got a PTFE bowden tube, you shouldn’t need to.
Well, it did not seem to have much resistance just now when I slacked it. ugh. Maybe the inside of the hotend is making the resistance. Any tips on how to make sure what is going on? One screwy thing is that Slic3r seems to print solid brim, but then it gets bogged down when it tries to print the rest.
It is the SeeMeCNC hotend with a PTFE lining. All of the stuff is on this page. http://seemecnc.com/collections/parts-accesories/hotends-and-extruders
The funny thing is that the cold end that I printed myself works better than the coldend that I got from them. Their cold end is also listed on that page.
Oh. The one difference in the hotend is that I switched to a 12v 40W heater cartridge instead of those resistors.
Don’t forget that extruder temperature vs. print speed can have an effect. I believe there is a sweet-spot temperature for a specific print speed. I have found that for higher print speeds I need higher temperature e.g. for PLA at 50mm/s 185C works but for 80mm/s 200C is better.
@Neil_Darlow , do you find that true even after auto tuning the PID for your extruder heater?
@Eric_Moy Yes the PID auto-tune gets the extruder to temperature quickly, with minimal overshoot, and maintains minimum error. The print speed vs. temperature thing is more about viscosity and extruder back-pressure.
For a little bit, I was running the temperature at a whopping 248C. That is probably not good for the PTFE lining in my hotend. I could smell that stinking up the place. The attempt was to get it so that there would not be so much backpressure. The thing is, my prints got weaker because the plastic’s polymer chains were breaking down. I do not feel like dealing with that anymore. I am sure that back-pressure may be why some people do not like using bowden style extruders. I don’t have much of an option though, considering it is a delta printer.
I actually was using the ez-struder for the last couple months and just switched back to an air tripper. I am still using the hobbed roll the ez-struder came with though.
I am having much better luck now. You may want to do a few cold pulls to make sure your hot end is clean and you are not getting any resistance though.
@Joe_Spanier my 2nd nozzle has an airtripper, although perhaps not a properly assembled one. I used the design that was supposed to have the rubber hose as a spring and just used normal screws instead to hold it in place. I think it slightly squishes the filament leading to a little bit of resistance in the bowden tube. I believe it is not having any trouble pushing through though. Even if the airtripper ended up having enough resistance to skip steps, I would rather have skipped steps than chewed up filament any day. A little bit of oil in the bowden tube should help with reducing the bowden tube friction too, I bet. As for doing the cold pulls, I have done that in the past before and it all boils down to me being fed up with having to pump up the temperature to dangerous amounts in order to get the filament pushed through successfully. I will try to find a pin/needle and see if I am getting gaps in my black filament though. If there are no holds in my black filament’s print, I will switch to an airtripper or some other design or at least see about replacing the spring, but I have doubts that a spring replacement will work. The bearing on the EZ-struder is small, so the amount of area being pushed by the pulley might not be as much as it needs to be.
Once I started storing my PLA in a sealed box along with a massive desicant can from amazon a lot of my jamming on my e3d went away. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003QZ6PZ0/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_8xZlub1HSXRJK
Also my hercustruder has been much more reliable for me.
I have recently baked my ABS.
OK…the white ABS was baked a few weeks ago…but they got baked.