Hi guys,
Many of us are facing clogging problems ( often or not so often ) especialy when prints with flexible filaments and try to figure out what in the world is going on. An E3D V6 or so hot end is a very clever as well as simple design to spread the melted filament onto heated bed. During the high temerature - from 200 deg Celcius and over- for long periods ( over a month and a half - if you print almost 24/7 ) , clogging appears and the prints are only in fairy tales. What is happening here? Some of you guys i’m sure you know it, but others don’t, so here i’m to show the solution:
Right before the nose and the heating block, there is a smal diameter PTFE tube ( 3,2mm Φ if i’m correct ) that guides the filament right into the nose feeded from the feeder Alu body. ( sorry for my english, but i’m trying to help ).
The side of the PTFE tube that " touches" the hot nose, tends to burn and shrink and this cause the filament clogging. See attached picture.
This tube nedd to be changed every one to two months. It’s cheap and 1 meter lasts at least one year.
If something seems unclear to understand, please tell me!
All my FFF printers have direct extruders. So the cheap feeding tube ( 4mm OD) is more than ok. Capricorn is mostly fo Bowden types extruders.
To be more accurate in my words: I mean the small diameter 3mm Φ OD tube between the nose and the feeder. Feeder tube is 4mm OD. See attached the red oval. If Capricorn produce such small tube, then i MUST buy a few meters.
Yes, that is why all-metal hotends are used to print higher-temperature materials. Above ~245C some PTFEs start to out-gas a toxin. Capricorn suggests their material is ok up to 275C, although they state “You should be fine printing slightly higher temp materials such as PETG in this range. (As long as there are no pet birds in the house.)” Apparently, there is a reason miners used canaries!
LOL. Yeah, for sure. 'Course, the canaries were really there to tell the miners, “GET OUT! NOW!”. I guess that’s OK if you’re prepared to evacuate your house every time you print.
Simple HOTEND FIX for Creality Ender 3, CR-10 - YouTube This is something I did for my ender3 pro bowden style printer. I did it without the washer because I coulsn’t thread the bowden tube into the extruder with the gasket in. It works fine without it.
Well here is the thing: Metal reacts with plastic like a glue. Debrises are sticking on the metal surface much faster than in teflon. This means that will clog fast especially when print with TPU. Would work if the metal tube inside the thermal block is GOLD PLATED, but this would be very expensive. And the fact is that only this little piece of tube ( all metal or with PTFE ) that is inside the thermal block makes the difference.
Your thoughts on this!
Actually, as someone who has done gold plating commercially, I can tell you that gold plating is not really expensive. That’s because the plating is extremely thin, usually measured in microns. That’s enough to give the item the properties of gold.
Just as an FYI, I was manager of a plant in the middle to late 70s that produced blank custom electronic circuit boards; specifically, the gold ‘fingers’ you’ve almost certainly seen on the edge of circuit boards that allow the boards to be plugged into other boards,
).
