I’m Tom and today i’m going to show you how to print flexible filament.
Now, this is going to be much less of a classic guide - because the basic process is the same
for every kind of filament.
You strap it into your extruder, heat up the printer and then print something out.
Instead, I’m going to show you the five most important things to keep in mind to successfully
print with flexible filaments.
But before we start, what is this flexible filament anyways?
The guys from E3D sent me some Ninjaflex, which is a patented filament that’s based
on thermoplastic polyurethane, or short TPU.
It’s often also simply called TPE, or thermoplastic elastomer.
It is very elastic, but isn’t really springy.
Rather, it dampens movement a lot, but always moves back into its original shape.
There are a couple other varieties of flexible filaments, like Filaflex or flexible PLA,
and these tips mostly apply to all of them.
Tip number one: Align your hobbed bolt and the feed hole of
your hotend.
When i started printing flexible filament, i could barely get it out any faster than
at snail’s pace or it would buckle in the extruder.
That was because that tiny misalignment of just about a millimeter between the center
of the hobbed area and the feed hole forced the filament into a curved path, which is
one of the worst things for printing flexible filament.
So spend a little extra time getting your hobbed bolt to line up.
Also, you might notice that there is a teflon tube in my extruder, and that is
Tip number two: If you have a bowden-compatible hotend, or
even if you don’t have one, you can use a piece of bowden tubing to guide the filament
all the way from the drive gear or hobbed bolt into the hotend, as that reduces the
friction on the filament as it pushes against the side walls of the filament channel in
the extruder body and hotend.
The E3D v6 makes that easy, as all 1.75mm v6es are essentially a bowden version and
you can use one continuous piece of tubing all the way from the drive gear to the bottom
of the heat sink.
Tip number three: The bowden tube trick works well for 1.75mm,
but what about 3mm filament?
Well, as it turns out, 3mm filament is way more stable down the extruder hole, so if
you have the choice between a 3mm and 1.75mm printer, use the 3mm one for the flexible
materials.
Also, long bowden tubes can be tricky.
Tip number four: A heated bed isn’t necessary, but it helps.
My new favorite thing in 3D printing is regular household glue stick, which is absolutely
awesome, because it grabs on to your prints as long as they are warm, but completely lets
go once everything is cooled off.
So for Ninjaflex, set your heated bed to about 40°C and use a thin layer of glue stick as
your bed topping.
Tip number five: If everything else fails, print slow.
This is especially true when you know that your printer works well with PLA or ABS, but
you just can’t seem to get the flexible stuff printing reliably.
Remember, this is a completely different class of raw material, so you might need to use
completely different settings.
Generally, 40mm/s is already a pretty high speed for the flexible stuff, but you might
need to drop that as low as 5mm/s to get it printing properly.
There’s no shame in doing so if it gets your printed part out.
Bonus tip!
Because i apparently can’t count to five.
Calibrating your extruder the classic way with flexible filament isn’t going to be
much use.
So use your tried-and-true settings from your ABS or PLA profile and fine-tweak the extrusion
multiplier as you go.
So that’s the most important things to keep in mind when you’re trying flexible filaments.
As far as the other settings go, it’s all cooking by the book: Extruder temperature
around 215°C and bridges an overhangs might be a bit harder to print.
So there you have it!
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