Nailed it.  (And Sanjay Mortimer ,

Nailed it.

(And @Sanjay_Mortimer , I don’t think I’ll need to send the e3d back, the issue is operator error. :slight_smile: Although something about overly aggressive retract causing clogging might be helpful to put in the FAQ.

Makey scaled x2, 0.1 mm layers, PLA, 180C, 10% infil, aggressive cooling

Looks good! Really good :slight_smile:

I’m going an e3d for my ingentis build, what’s the retract tip you have for us mate? What were your findings?

The defaults for Kisslicer are both 1.25 for suck and prime. I had successful prints for things like vases and hollow test cubes (not a lot of retraction), but more complex prints had the filament clogging the nozzle.

I’ve moved the fan down a little lower on the heat sink to cool the SS heat break (I don’t think this is a factor), and I’ve got a 120mm fan blowing on the build surface (which helped with the overhangs), but changing the Prime and Suck to .25 presented the robot as you see here with very little cleanup.

Oh? I currently need about 4.5mm retracts for good results :-/ maybe the e3d will be different but .25 seems way low - you have a Bowden machine?

I’m a bit concerned now, I hear on one hand that its the best hotend around but I hear a lot of people having issues too :-/

Hope your good results continue!

@Jarred_Baines sloshing your filament almost 5 millimetres back and forth every time your extruder needs to change stance sounds like an awful lot to me. I recently have printed a smallish fan duct - E3D duct for a larger fan, the one with a multitude of little holes in it - and even with my measly 0.7 destring settings the extruder started squeaking by the end of the print, of all these ups and downs…

@Jarred_Baines That was part of my problem. I was using high retracts in Slic3r, and honestly didn’t have the same value for Suck and prime in KISSlicer (2 suck, 1.25 prime…which, doing the math, would starve the extruder with every retract) .25 and .25 is working well for me, though I’ll admin I’m currently running 132% extrude rate to get things flowing nicely. I’ll home in on a value and change the firmware when I have a little more experience.

I think that’s what amazes me about this technology: A really good, consistent, print is the result of about 300 different variables coming together, just right, for the situation…and I suspect there’s a lot of variability in those variables.

Yeah, there’s a LOT of variables, but luckily once u get them sorted, one by one, (like this retract thing) you learn the acceptable range for your machine and material and don’t have to do the guess-work forever :wink:

Now that I know you had 2mm retract and 1.25 prime, I reckon THAT might’ve been your whole issue, imagine on small details, if there were 10 retracts in a short space of time your material is 7.5mm up above the heat zone, jiggling further up each time, that could easily block a hot end, in fact if I WANTED to block my hot end I that would be a good method to start with!

@Igor_Larine - Bowden extruders commonly need more retraction than direct drive (a LOT more) to help with oozing… I always had issues with it around the 1-2mm mark and if doing small features I set it to only retract if moving more than 10mm or so - in slic3r you can also specify a “minimum material delivery before extract” to disallow multiple retracts over a very small area.

With nylon I know some people with Bowden’s use up to 7mm!