I am thinking of using a 1.0 mm nozzle for printing some vase designs and would appreciate any recommendations for slicer settings specific to vases and 1.75mm PLA filament in a direct drive extruder- layer height, flow rate, etc?? I figure there will need to be some experimentation to fine tune the settings, but a starting point would be helpful.
Well, if you create a new profile with an 1mm nozzle, then any slicer should create a valid profile.
You probably just need to increase the temperature a lot (e.g. print PLA with 230°C) or reduce the speed a lot, or you will get thermal runaways quite easy.
Would you not have to have a printer that can heat a lot of plastic?
Good point!
I figure if the print speed is slower (approx 2.5x slower than when using a 0.4 mm nozzle) the quality of the print should be similar. Definitely will require some experimentation to fine tune parameters.
It will mainly depend on how efficient the hotend and nozzle are at heating the filament.
@akc, you never said exactly why you want to use a 1mm nozzle to print vases. Can’t help wondering what the idea is.
That’s why I suggested printing slower and/or increasing the temperature. If you want to print really fast there is no way around a new hotend.
If you have watched recent DrVax videos, you may have noticed Irv mentioned that using a 1.0mm nozzle can print a thicker walled vase when using spiralize mode. A thicker wall on vases makes them not only more sturdy, but much more likely to NOT leak.
The area of a 1mm orifice is .785 The area of a .4mm orifice is .126 Sq/mm That is a tad over 6 times larger
I suspected thicker walls might be 1 reason, but hadn’t thought about watertightness.
To take full advantage of a larger nozzle, you need to figure out the maximum volumetric rate your hotend can handle. This will vary based on filament, nozzle, and hotend characteristics. If you push more filament than your hotend can handle, you will start to get under extrusion, extruder skipping, and possible jams. With an E3D V6 hotend and 0.80mm nozzle, I can push 0.64mm layer heights with 0.96mm extrusion widths. at roughly 40mm/s with PLA but closer to 80mm/s with PETG. I’ve got some notes on measuring the maximum volumetric rate for a given hardware setup here that you might find interesting.
Effective maximum volumetric rate is measured in mm^3/s as:
Extrusion Width X Layer Height X Speed
Your maximum speeds should be set to avoid going any faster than your hotend can melt and move filament.
As far as extrusion widths, the common recommendation is to stay within 120% of your nozzle size, though if you’re using better quality nozzles with a properly sized neck around the opening, you can often get away with 200%. That means a 0.80mm nozzle can print a 1.6mm wide single extrusion in vase mode. Provided you stick to lower layer heights, this should give excellent inter-layer adhesion.
@bobstro Thanks for the info!
Fortunately I do not need to be printing with a 1.0 mm nozzle right away, so I will have time to study all the info provided and do some experimenting.