Esun Elastic TPE 83A
Hi,
This is my first post on this forum. I've had a MK3 S+ that I built from a kit last month, my first 3d printer. I've been printing PLA and PETG components and had no problems using the standard settings. I decided to jump in with a TPE component as I wanted to print someting similar to the membrane that you often find in TV remotes with buttons on a .5mm sheet.
I cold pulled the nozzle with cleaning filament set the extruder drive loose, used a textured plate and selected the nearest flex filament, made sure cooling and extraction were off. After fighting the extruder gears, as expected, I eventually got this soft filament to extrude. I needed to manually help the filament from the esun drier as the extruder gears couldn't reliably overcome the inertia of the reel.
A few aborted prints trying different filament settings resulted in big holes in the print; and I diagnosed that the filament wasn't extruding fast enough on long repetitive runs. The only setting I could find that seemed relevant was the MVS setting. This was set to 1.67 in the Amazon TPU filament I was using as a base so I lowered it to 1 mm3/s. The component then printed well. My question is: is this the parameter I should of changed or am I missing something?
Also any tips on how to ease the filament path from a drier to the extruder would be welcome, I'm thinking of designing a motorised reel driver based on the filament tension but if there's an easier way...
The filament is great and produced exactly what I wanted, incredibly flexible and strong.
Thanks for listening,
Paul