Printing with flex filament
Hello, when printing with Flex 95 filament, the filament wraps around the drive gear during the print. The issue can occur after 1 hour or even after 10 hours.
I’m using the default settings for "Ultrafuse 95". I've loosened the screws by 1.5 turns.
Do you have any settings that work reliably?
Thancks
Romain
Caveat: The following was learned on the XL, not the Core one.
The nextruder needs the lightest possible grip and a small amount of back-tension in the filament to print TPEs well and they must be printed slowly.
Temporarily pull back the bend and disconnect the PTFE tube, push your Flex 95 through the tube and grip the end, pull it gently - we know it feeds through but now reduce your pull and check that the filament retracts itself under its own tension.
If the inside of the tube is dusty or worn it can prevent the extruder retraction propagating up the tube causing slack at the extruder which may result in the filament wrapping you have experienced.
Cleaning dust out of the tube might be enough.
I have been reasonably successful bypassing the tube and feeding directly to the toolhead from an overhead spool providing tension with a small fishing weight hanging on a loop but I need to experiment more before I recommend the practice.
I tend to use flexibles on the XL only in multimaterial parts, usually as hinges, so this hasn't been tested for long prints - most pure TPE prints I still do on my old Mk3.
Cheerio,