esun petg

[Tim]

My vase stayed stuck to the bed (hairspray, and the bed at 70C as I mentioned before). But it popped off so easily I wouldn't say that it was firmly attached by any measure. I will also bump up the bed temperature to 80C for the next print. I noticed before that with my PET+, running the fan would cool down the bed and the piece would make alarming popping noises as it started to shrink and detach from the bed. I got into the habit of printing the PET+ without the fan running at all. The petg is obviously a lot better in that respect, but it's not totally immune from warping and shrinkage. I hope that just getting the right bed temperature will do the trick.

[Tim]

Steve---which V4 extruder do you have, the all-metal one or the one with the lining?

[jdacal]

All three of my rolls are smooth filament as well. I took a few measurements on the blue roll and I was reading right around 1.74mm, but I don't usually trust my readings on filament, always have doubts if i am applying too much tension to the caliper or not enough. But most of them read 1.74 where on my normal reels I'm usually right at 1.75. Not that it makes a difference it"s printing great, so far its coming off the glass without having to pry it out, unlike my PLA and ABS with Elmer's which usually take a bit of prying to get them to pop off. But I'm running the bed lower than normal at 85 rather than 110. Will probably go back to 100-110 since when it ran the drool at the start sequence it didn't stick to the bed when it did the wipe. Stuck ok once it got to the area were the glue was.

Had my Z off on the first print. aargh.

[sprior]

The print finished just fine, here it is.

The first batch of dual extruders went out with one each of the all metal and the PTFE insulated. Since the left nozzle is the PTFE one that's the one that got the most use. I did have a problem with PLA jamming in the right nozzle which I've heard might be an issue with all metal extruders. I'm currently planning to buy an extra hot end with PTFE and a 0.5mm nozzle. I'm planning to take the 0.35 nozzle off my all metal extruder and put it on the extra PTFE one, then put the 0.5mm nozzle on the all metal hot end. I'll play with BronzeFill with the all metal hot end with the bigger nozzle and hopefully the PTFE hot end will help with printing PLA. The only concern is that CopperFill is coming out and there is mention that it may have a problem with all metal hot ends - there's always something.

I'm also mostly holding off on doing more dual extruder work until the next version of SImplify3D comes out. The 2.1.2 version just doesn't support it well and they're supposedly working on that for the next version.

[jdacal]

Nice! These colors really pop!

[jimc]

Well i didnt have a chance to try it out this evening but its great you guys are having good luck with it right out of the box, first print. Thats a really good sign.

[jdacal]

Here's three colors I did. Printed fine, no problems at all. Any flaws are in my settings.

Kind of telling I guess is that the stems are ABS. You can compare on the blue flower the stem to the rose and see a big difference in how clean the layers went down with the same settings.

.2mm layer height, 245 nozzle (24v printer), 110 Bed, no fan

2014-11-23 02.00.12_1.jpg (209.57 KiB) Viewed 18657 times

2014-11-23 02.00.29_1.jpg (156.4 KiB) Viewed 18657 times

[Tim]

Less joy 2nd time around.

I switched from printing a simple vase to printing a collection of filament clips and dust filters, and immediately started running into problems. I got a lot of stringing, and had to adjust the parameters accordingly, but that wasn't the big problem. The big problem was that the filament got jammed, on three prints in a row. The filament was not getting jammed down in the hot-end; it was getting jammed just below the extruder motor gear. I'm not sure what the cause is. Possibly it is getting hot enough above the hot-end to start deforming. Once in that state, it's hard to get out. Once I was able to reverse extrude it and pull it out the top. The other two times, though, I had to dismantle the extruder, cut the filament in the middle, and draw both pieces out of the middle. They would no longer pull out of the top or out of the bottom. Fortunately, the V4 design makes it very easy to do this.

And most unfortunately, the 3rd time around, in a moment of inattention, I accidentally jabbed the screwdriver into the 24V fan while it was running and sheared off a couple of fan blades. Because I had the split supply for a long time, all the replacement fans I have lying around are 12V. So I'm out of commission for a few days while I order some new 24V fans. (post-edit: Duh, it's a 12V fan. So let me get this thing back up and running. . . )

Meanwhile, any ideas on what caused the jam, and what can be done about it? Anybody else have that issue?

One other thing I found while experimenting was that the petg really starts to lose adhesion to the bed somewhere between roughly 80 and 90 degrees C. So I have been running prints with the bed set at 90, and they seem to stick well.

[sprior]

I agree on the adhesion. First I tried 70C with glue stick and had to put it on MUCH heavier than normal to get it to stick, then I tried 80C and got the same results. Will try 90C next time.

[jdacal]

I switched filaments 3 times last night to do the 3 flower colors and had no jamming so far. Probably unrelated but I had a random jamming problem last week in the area you mention. Turned out a little burr had formed near the entrance hole to the hot end. When the chisel tip of the filament would randomly hit that burr it would jam and keep it from sliding into the hole. It was really tiny, I had to use an X-acto from the bearing opening to cut it away and worked fine since.

I switched to 110 bed temperature and it adhered pretty good. Good enough not to come off easily, but definitely came off much easier than with the PLA and ABS.

EDIT: I use glue stick as well, usually 2 to 3 coats.