@John_Ridley So true. Repraper destroyed one of my MG hotends. Have numerous spools that terrify me everytime I try to make a print. Not worth it. Had hoped MH had good filament but it doesnt sound promising.
I’ll have to get some from ultimachine and et you know how it compares. I think I’ll be returning the Matter Hackers stuff, I can’t have used more than an ounce or two of a spool, and all of it to scraps.
In my own experience with PLA, I’ve found it to be much more tricky than ABS. What finally worked for me was to crank up cooling – I took a Vornado box fan and blew it right into the printer once the print job started – the resulting cooling of the extruded PLA did wonders for its ability to bridge, and also got rid of jamming. I think by cranking up the cooling of the nozzle,I was essentially forcing the heater block to report colder than it was internally, causing it to run hotter at the heating end, but at the same time, I was keeping the filament that was still not in the hot end to stay cold, preventing the deformation from heat soak.
Also, because you may have some remnants of your older filament still in the heat tube, make sure you have run your extruder long enough to fully purge it of any older stuff. In particular, if you were running ABS at (say) 240, try to feed the PLA fast at 240 for a couple miinutes before turning down the temp to 220 or even lower. Otherwise, stray ABS might still be in the extruder and cause problems.
Oh, and one more thing – try running the extruder continuously for a few minutes at different speeds – you’ll probably find that there’s no problem with doing that – but you might still experience jamming when you’re diong an actual print job – if that’s the case, you might be developing back pressure from too much plastic being extruded – again, very likely if you went from ABS to PLA – PLA has a higher packing density. Try under-flowing plastic by oversizing the filament diameter in the slicer and try again.
I’ve been PLA the whole time, but what you’re saying about ABS makes sense.
@Dave_Atkinson Do you think “Tube Made of Teflon® PTFE 1/4” OD X 1/8" ID" would work? It says that the temperature range is -350 to 500 degrees F. A one foot length of it isn’t mush $$, could go a long way to helping prevent kinks.
I have the same problem with green ABS. I tried increasing the temp to 230 but eventually it gets clogged. I have the makerbot MK6 extruder.