Best settings for PETG/PLA support purge tower
Hello all,
I recently got my hands on the Prusa XL with 5 nozzles, and was looking forward to leveraging PETG supports. So far, it seems the process of actually supporting a PLA print with PETG has been very successful. However, I am running into issues with the PLA/PETG purge tower. It seems the purge tower quickly becomes very inconsistent in layer height and flow rate and ultimately causes it to detach from itself (not from the build plate, as in it breaks near the bottom).
What methods have people been using to prevent this kind of messy mixed material purge tower? Are there settings that I should be leveraging? I am pretty new to PrusaSlicer so I apologize for amateur understanding.
RE: Best settings for PETG/PLA support purge tower
I love this feature with the XL.
In Prusaslicer, you can define which extruder will build the tower. It defaults to any extruder (0). For multifilament prints, I almost always pick whichever filament that builds the 1st layer to have the same bed temperature. Occasionally I may pick another extruder which is of the same material as the base layer. Typically, this is when the base color isn’t used a lot later in the build to save on extruder changes.
My preferred support method is to use a different material interface only. So for a PETG print I specify a PLA extruder for the interface only. It minimizes problems with the purge tower if your interface is mostly horizontal.
All of these settings are under the “ Multiple Extruder” in the “Print Settings” tab in the slicer.