Printing Flex Filament with the Flashforge

[Geoff]

Hey guys,

I am not sure if any of you have gotten into other types of filament, me personally the toughest time I ever had with any was the wood filament, and the ONLY time I have needed blue painters tape, as it just will not stick to kapton to save my life.. but that's another story.


Flexible Filament.. Yep it's being sold pretty commonly now, and I sort of took a punt on buying a cheap roll from China. It cost me $80 for a 1kg roll, and when I say cheap for the Tolerance this has (super super low, can print at 0.1) this is cheap for 1kg. Their wood filament is also $70 for 1kg, which is VERY cheap compared to 250gms of Laywoo d3 for $40!!! Ordered on a Friday, I watched DHL ship it from Hong Kong to my door by Monday.
*** Update - Sadly, there is a reason Laywoo D3 is $40 for 250 grams, its GOOD!. I have now 1kg of wood filament here that will not stick to aluminum, kapton, blue tape, yellow tape, hairspray, abs slurry.. you name it. Argh.

Now, the first issue that got to me when trying Flexible filament was the extruder. It would not feed. Tried everything, tried feeding it with the fan off, different temperatures etc, nothing anyone suggested worked, and the manufacturer gave me incorrect temperature settings.

My original extruders for my Flashforge 3D were stock, they had no spring load, just a bearing and gear. Now, while these suck for ABS and PLA as they slip alot more, they are GREAT for flexible filament, in fact I could not use flex filament at all with the spring loaded extruder. Picture below explains how my experience went.



Since my original extruders had issues with the nozzles, I was lucky and had spares - I understand you may not, so I am making a printable version of the above left extruder for you guys, very simple but effective.

You can run it next to your other one at the same time, me personally I use my left extruder for ABS/PLA and my right for Wood and Flex.



Temperatures that worked well:
235c Nozzle
60c Hotbed
Kapton tape


So how did my prints go?

First attempt terrible, second not so bad, Octopus came out well..



Third test print I tried a low poly pokemon.. What did I learn? INFILL INFILL.. INFILL..

If you don't use enough infill the flex sags and you get holes, I suggest 50% or more!!!

RAFTS are VERY easy to remove. Easier than plastic.

Supports AVOID if you can!!!. They are really messy with flex and leave alot of little bits you need to cut off.

Retraction Rate set low, if you are able to. You want a fast retraction so it doesn't leave mess when its travelling fast - or avoid big travel movements.

Printing Speed needs to be 30-40ms feed. Any faster and it gets messy.





So to print very nice Flex/rubber prints, follow the above and you should be ok to go!


*****
I am testing the printable extruder for Flex filament, give me a couple of days, need to make it pretty solid.
****

[Roxy]

Wow! Great write up! It will be a while before I can play with this, but for sure it is on my To Do list!

[curious aardvark]

any files for the older extruder yet ?
I'd really like to use ninjaflex - but discovered it just won't feed.

[Geoff]

any files for the older extruder yet ?
I'd really like to use ninjaflex - but discovered it just won't feed.

No, but its almost done sorry, got held up with kids of school sick this week :/

It is a small print, will only take you max 25mins to print when I post it up here, so bare with me.

[curious aardvark]

I'm bareing I'm bareing :-)

[Geoff]

I'm bareing I'm bareing :-)

Flashforge dead.

I have no comments right now, I am in mourning.

[Roxy]

Flashforge dead.

I have no comments right now, I am in mourning.

This is the same Flashforge that the company would not stand behind? Good riddance!

[Geoff]

This is the same Flashforge that the company would not stand behind? Good riddance!

Yep..

BUT it's all good

Besides the prusa... I took a good look at my flashforge and thought hang on.. 2 dead steppers, that means I have 3 working ones.. and a spare off the old extruder.. So I shopped around today and got myself a delta kossel mini too to play around with.

The idea was to have the Flashforge as a spare, but now thats gone so I need another back up or two. If the kossel mini is as easy to build as it looks, i will build 2!

[curious aardvark]

dead ? how'd it die ??

[Geoff]

dead ? how'd it die ??

Turns out two things happened...

I thought just the steppers had died, I mean these things have done thousands of hours, and for such extended periods of time, I am not saying at all they were bad quality... after seeing stepper motors die on photocopiers after a couple of weeks, I think I did pretty well.

Anyway, I took the dead steppers (lost Z and X.. would you believe it... ok fair enough one dies.. but two??!?! how bad luck is that lol... ) and plugged them into the extruder power output and nope, completely dead (extruders were still working fine, just piling plastic up on the messed up print...)

So I decided to take a working stepper and try the output for the X and Z before I bothered checking the mega or anything else, and bam... no go. So , basically the small drivers on the RAMPS board I am pretty sure are the problem.. Now, this is not to say I don't have a spare ramps, mega and pretty much an entire flashforge in spare parts, but you know what... after the past few weeks, and considering I literally was building one I thought, lol this has to be fate...

Parts are so cheap now, to be honest I don't even know if I could ever buy a built one again. I managed to now get 2 printers for less than the flashforge cost me. I know it's been a while, but still ..

Complete rostock electronics kit... $150 delivered (and thats with the good metal hot end)
kossel printed parts - easy, takes about 300 grams of plastic.
metal rods, etc... half of it is radio control helicopter parts... carbon rods, fittings etc - even in kit its pretty cheap - buy it all in one bundle for about $200-$300...
Powersupply? a laptop powersupply or pc ATX power supply... gee how many of those have I got?