Printing Flex Filament with the Flashforge

[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?

[basfud]

The issue with the spring loaded filament motor is that it presses the filament too tightly, teeth cut in, and can pull it out of the head (that's what she said). Another thing is the hydraulic pressure that builds up on extrusion when you load the filament, if it enters head it heats too slowly and a lot of pressure builds up that's enough to curl the filament past motor and before head (due to slow heat transmission). You got to preheat the filament in the head before moving the motors.

Put the filament into the motor by hand, as far as you can, with preheated head. Ideally you want it to extrude a bit while pushing by hand. Then pull up a little. It should print OK then. If not, loosen the pressure on the motor lever (place a toothpick in it or sth).

Geoff, as I said in another thread, good luck with the build.
I'm kind of worried about Flashforge that they have a good product that works fine, and instead of honing it into perfection they release new revamped better bigger harder versions. It's kind of stupid imvho, and I worry they will try to abandon the working Rep1 based design in favor of the other nice shiny glossy ones like MB and a lot of other companies did.

I wish they'd go the route to perfect the existing wooden design so you could buy those printers even more cheaply, run them down to death, then get more.

[Geoff]

The issue with the spring loaded filament motor is that it presses the filament too tightly, teeth cut in, and can pull it out of the head (that's what she said). Another thing is the hydraulic pressure that builds up on extrusion when you load the filament, if it enters head it heats too slowly and a lot of pressure builds up that's enough to curl the filament past motor and before head (due to slow heat transmission). You got to preheat the filament in the head before moving the motors.

Put the filament into the motor by hand, as far as you can, with preheated head. Ideally you want it to extrude a bit while pushing by hand. Then pull up a little. It should print OK then. If not, loosen the pressure on the motor lever (place a toothpick in it or sth).

Geoff, as I said in another thread, good luck with the build.
I'm kind of worried about Flashforge that they have a good product that works fine, and instead of honing it into perfection they release new revamped better bigger harder versions. It's kind of stupid imvho, and I worry they will try to abandon the working Rep1 based design in favor of the other nice shiny glossy ones like MB and a lot of other companies did.

I wish they'd go the route to perfect the existing wooden design so you could buy those printers even more cheaply, run them down to death, then get more.

Problem is, you can't push Flex filament into an extruder

[basfud]

Problem is, you can't push Flex filament into an extruder

I was talking from experience I mean, I did print a lot of Ninjaflex on Creator. It worked brilliantly, did dual materials too.

You got to make sure the motors are aligned perfectly with the nozzle inlets in the alu block. Then the filament goes all the way down into the heater without problems.

Once you get it feeding, it works like a charm, but initially I had issues on having it not pull the ninjaflex into the motor. It would extrude a bit of filament and then jam. But if you do as I said, it should work OK.