Advantages of a larger diameter nozzle
I am just about to order a mk3 and wondered if it will be an advantage to order a bigger diameter nozzle also. The printer will be used on a light commercial basis so speed will be helpful if the printer has the capacity for this (extruder speed and hot end). Also will I have to make up my own settings or will there be settings to suit the larger diameter nozzles?
Thanks for any help.
Mick
Re: Advantages of a larger diameter nozzle
There are advantages, but with the Mk3, they are less relevant than with a cheaper printer.
The Mk3 does a fantastic job of printing VERY fast with the included E3D V6 hotend.
With 0.2mm layer height it spews plastic as fast as the hot end can melt it when doing infill. If you increase layer height to 0.3mm you can actually run with the factory 0.4mm nozzle almost max extrusion rate at all times.
A 0.6mm nozzle is at least 50% more filament per distance of travel. However its recommended to not print less than 25% of nozzle diameter. (Quality starts to go down, speed goes down, etc) so that gives you a minimum of 0.15 layer height, and that quality will still be less than the 0.4mm nozzle at 0.2nd layer height. (standard default layer height)
Basically unless you invest in a E3D volcano hot end, which SPEWS filament, there's no point in a bigger nozzle. (i think)
However when printing with large nozzles on a volcano, basically, any advantage a quality printer has over a cheap printer... Goes away.
Large nozzles,
Advantages:
Lots of filament fast.
Huge layer heights.
Hides imperfections from cheap printer.
Disadvantages.
Less fine details.
No fine layer heights.
Can not exploit advantages of expensive printers.
If you want perfect prints without imperfections, you will have to tweak your profiles. My current cheap printer(200$), I have 5 profiles, for 3 brands of filament... Yep, one of the brands needs a profile for every color!! (Not buying that brand again either)
Then again my quality on that cheap printer is better than many 3d printing youtube stars get, with 3000$ printers.
PS: my mk3 is supposed to ship this week!!
Edit: I'm not saying my printer is that good. I have every symptom of a cheap printer on my prints. Most of the YouTube guys only use default profiles, and not customize it. There are some guys on here, with such amazing quality compared to me every time I see it, I think. "Wow, I hope I can get in the same ballpark when I get my mk3!"
Hi, I'm Sean. I used to work on CNC machines.
I try to not make mistakes, but the decision is YOURS.
Please feel free to donate to my filament/maintance fund.