Alright so for the most part I think I have this PLA figured out. I had to a an oil pad(paper towel soaked in vegetable oil) at the entrance to my extruder to keep the PLA from jamming after about 20 minutes.
I got the owl of after ~8ish hours with out many hiccups but I’m not sure what all the “hairs” are from.
The gyro cube didn’t go as well. The extruder jammed after 3.5 hours and had lots of oozing and wired irregularities in the sides. Any one have any advice on how to kick these issues?
I printed these at:
218°c any lower and I back feed my extruder
5mm retract 180mm/sec
What brand of PLA is it? Some PLA can require temps of up to 230C. The E3D handles PLA just fine in my experience, you shouldn’t need any kind of oil pad.
I am running into the same pla jamming issues on my e3d. I switched to abs for now. Thanks for reminding me about the oil trick. I heard about that on here before… But had forgotten.
The PLA giving me issues was from maker tool works (silver color). I bought it on their $25 spool sale around Thanksgiving. One thing I noticed is they put their sticker over another sticker. It is actually pla from inventables.
@Joe_Spanier the hairs are a normally a result of nozzle ooze and can usually be fixed by dialling in your retraction settings but in this case I’m not so sure as there are a lot more hairs than I would expect to see on the gyro cube. Have you calibrated for extrusion temp and flow rate? They are generally the 2 factors that define print quality if the bot’s mechanics are sound.
@Tim_Rastall can you suggest anything interesting for a Greg’s Wade extruder (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:65939)? I found one that’s just a bracket for a fan but the plastic on my test pieces sags a bit on the side opposite to the fan, so am looking for a real duct, before giving up and surrounding the whole thing with an array of fans
I am very new at this but I found setting too much retraction length and speed exacerbated filament jamming/grinding. I also think there is probably a big difference (a factor of 3/1.57 squared) between 1.75mm and 3mm filament as far as the ideal retraction settings are concerned. For 3mm filament I don’t go beyond 2mm and 20 mm/s. For 1.75 mm I imagine at least twice this (4 mm, 40 mm/s) would be OK.
It would take a lot of force to retract 3mm filament 5mm at 180 mm/s.
Yea part of my issues are retracting far and often in things like the gyro cube. It had ground straight through the filament. @Tim_Rastall@ThantiK what kind of retract do you guys use for pla
