More Nylon 618 printing
https://sites.google.com/site/321soldersucker/home/3d-printed-object-gallery/twistedheartvase
How is your nylon dimensional stability/accuracy doing? I’m thinking of trying a cold garolite bed with nylon to print other robot parts. I’m worried about controlling and/or compensating for shrinkage.
It’s pretty good actually, at least for thin objects with low density like the stem vases I showed on my blog. I found that with bigger area/solid objects like the extruder handle (on this article: https://sites.google.com/site/321soldersucker/home/3d-printed-object-gallery/firstadventuresinnylon ) I had mixed results using combinations of Kapton with PVA or gluestick. In general, I was getting very similar warping patterns and shrinkage to ABS although shielding the bed from drafts with a paper wall seemed to help. I’m keen to try a heated bed to see if this improves matters, but based on prior experience I think even with a heated bed I’ll need glue too. I have a sheet of Tufnol (Whale Brand) to try - I think this is the same as Garolite? Anyway, the reason I haven’t tried it as yet is that I haven’t sorted out how to consistently use auto-levelling using an inductive probe. I tried Aluminium foil on the landing spots, but it was very hit & miss.
My best advice so far, certainly for Taulman 618, is to treat it like ABS and try to shield it from drafts. Use copious amounts of PVA or Glue stick on the edges of the model, in particular the corners. Another thing to take into account for practical models like robot parts, is that providing you don’t use a huge amount of infill and more than 3 solid top/bottom layers, with Nylon you will have enough flex for hinges and joints and will also find it is much more forgiving that PLA or ABS for slight errors in size when fitting to other parts. Also, as their website advises, printing at 245c gives the best layer bonding which would be essential for your application. Even dropping a small amount to say 237c produced a lower strength layer bond in my testing, while the 245c prints are incredibly tough.
Avoiding drafts… does this mean that a blower on/near the nozzle is not advised for Nylon? I currently have one to help with bridges/overhangs. I could remove it, or re-duct it to NOT try to cool extruded plastic quickly for Nylon.
No, I don’t use fans at all on Nylon and have had much better luck since disabling them.