Elegoo Neptune 3 Printer - Question

[Luciant]

I'm new to 3d printing. I purchased an Elegoo Neptune 3 Printer and i'm trying to print some very low resolution prints. It's board game organizers so the quality is not important.

Question

I'm trying to increase the speed of the prints and I would like to purchase a larger nozzle. Is it possible to purchase a new larger nozzle and install it? Is it that simple? I intend to increase my layer height from .4 to at least .6 or .8.

Any help you can provided is appreciated.

[fred_dot_u]

The typical stock nozzle is 0.4 mm diameter. With the restrictions on nozzle size versus layer thickness/height, you're limited to a 0.3 mm layer for your prints. You might be able to push it to 0.32 mm if you are willing to test the printer's limits. The math is usually eighty percent of the nozzle diameter for max layer height.

This means you aren't going to get 0.4 mm layer height with a 0.4 mm nozzle. You can, with a 0.5 mm nozzle, but you want larger. A "practical" larger nozzle would be 0.8 mm diameter, providing a 0.64 layer height, which is rather substantial and more than three times the out-of-the-box defaults for most printer/slicer combinations.

What I've learned, however, is that it won't necessarily be three times as fast. One benefits from the wider nozzle, putting more material on the build plate in the x/y direction and also a thicker layer with more material in the z direction. A key factor is how much filament will your hot end melt to the correct and necessary temperature?

Only today, I saw a reference for this exact environment. I don't recall the precise numbers, but these will be ballpark. With a stock 0.4 mm nozzle, the printing speed might be 180 mm/second. Moving up to a 0.8 mm nozzle, it was necessary to cut the speed in half, as the filament volume also increases with the nozzle size and the heater was unable to keep up.

On the other hand, three times the volume of filament at the cost of only half the speed returns a fifty percent improvement.

It seems practical.

Regarding your specific printer, I lack familiarity with that model. Determine the hot end configuration and perform an internet search for nozzle types to match.

Important considerations are to hold tightly the pre-heated hot end assembly at the heater block without damaging the wires for the heater and the thermistor. Remove carefully the very hot nozzle and install the new one. The new nozzle should seat against the heat break inside the heater block prior to the nozzle shoulders contacting the heater block. If it contacts the block, this allows for a gap between the heat break and nozzle, from which melted filament will ooze and create a very high nuisance blob.

good luck

[Luciant]

Very helpful information. Thank you for your time on this. Seems like I need to do some testing to find the right balance of layer height, nozzle size, flow rate, and heating.