Our printer has been mostly operational for a while now,

3D Printing
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Our printer has been mostly operational for a while now, but we still get what I think is an unreasonably high number of filament jams. The printer is a Prusa i3 from NorCalReprap, with a Gregs Wade extruder and a JHead with 0.35mm nozzle, we’re mostly printing ABS and have tried a few different rolls now all with the same results.

Most of the time we get fairly reasonable prints out of it, not amazing, but good enough at 0.2mm layer height. But we get a lot of jams, I’d say 1 in 4 prints fails with a jam at some point. Usually this is inside the extruder where the filament bunches up just underneath the hobbed bolt, this is usually a quick and easy fix. About 1/3rd of the time however the jam is below the extruder where the filament enters the peek tube it just all bunches up. This is a pain to fix as it means taking the whole extruder off.

Anyone got any suggestions as to why this is happening? We don’t yet have a fan pointed directly at the J-Head cold end, I had thought this was only necessary on PLA. Anything else I should be looking at that could be causing this, or is this number of jams just par for the course with a J-Head?

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Insulating tape around the J-Head and some proportion of the airflow from a fan directed at it seem to be the accepted practice now. It is certainly recommended for PLA but also helps for ABS. You should be able to print reliably with a J-Head as long as it is well looked-after.

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Hmm, we’ve got the kapton all around the hot part of the J-Head, I do have some ceramic insulation tape with a foil side that I might try wrapping around it to insulate it further. I’ll see about getting the fan pointing at the cold end setup then. Thanks!