Filament jams just happen sometimes and I’ve been just living with it for 2 years. Today, I’ve been wrestling with a challenging 1 hour long dual extrusion print and my left extruder has been clogging (210C, 40mm/s) and just driving me crazy. It started well, but just jams halfway through. I double checked the level of the printer and it was fine. After searching the net, I found some mention of oiling the filament with canola or 3-in-one oil. There is some 3-in-one in my cabinet for lubing carriage so I lightly coated my fingers and applied it to the filament just above the inlet for the drive. Nothing excessive, just a light rub. It’s printing perfectly now. Who would have thunk. It seems the extra lubrication helps overcome the friction of the PTFE tube, so logically it makes sense. I don’t know the long term disadvantages to periodically oiling the filament when it begins to jam. Has anyone else had experience with this? Have you installed filament oilers seen on thingiverse? If so, which one?
Here is a picture of what I’m working on. I designed it from scratch on Tinkercad.
We have this happen occasionally on our LulzBot TAZ 4 upgraded to the all metal hot end. We just dip the tip of the PLA filament in some canola oil and then extrude a couple hundred millimeters to make sure that any excess oil clears the hotend. This has only needed to be done with PLA but it makes all the difference in the world with under or erratic extrusion. We seem to need to re-oil it every hundred hours or so of operation.
On the Ultimaker, which uses a bowden system, I always use a little bit of olive oil to reduce the friction in the tube and to prevent under-extrusion. I have a little filter done with a sponge to clean all the dust, and it has some drops of olive oil to keep the filament always a little bit slippy. I don’t know if olive oil will be the best, but I can tell that it works!
I used to use oil, but now I use a coat of WS2 or HBN dry-lube. This coat lasts for over 100 hours run time (usually something else has gone wrong, so I re-lube when I have to correct for model coming off bed and jamming fans. http://www.atl-3d.com/extruder-dry-lube/ 335
I do the same thing although I use 3-1 oil… really any oil that won’t burn in the nozzle should work just fine honestly! I notice that things print better and also the risk of jams seems to go down not only due to the filament sliding better but any dust on the filament getting wiped off helps a lot.
Now that is also very true. I’m usually happy with the Microcenter filament EXCEPT:
1. Silver. Silver always jams after 2 hours
2. Gold. Not sure what the issue is, but their gold is brittle…
So I get those from Amazon, and the other colors (including GITD) from Microcenter.
Oh. Another thing I forgot – for a brief time, E3D didn’t have good QC on their nozzles (the “0.4mm area” was 3.5mm long)they’ve since stepped up their game)… and you *had* to lubricate them (dry lube or oil). And there are many counterfeits of E3D; I’m not sure if the counterfeits have their game in order.
My extruder are .4mm SS. That’s a good call on the temp. I have been running my extruder a hotter (210) thinking that it would cause the filament to flow better. Also, I have decreased my speed to get better resolution on the prints. I was running 80mm/s, but the intricate wording was just not clearly printing. Maybe I need to revisit my temp for lower speed. 40mm/s seems to give the best results, even though it takes a little longer. I’ve been doing a lot of dual extrusion stuff where details are important. What settings are you other guys running?
Huh, I’ve been running perimeters max 60mm/s, but I think I have settled myself for a nice speed:
40mm/s perimeters (20 for small), and only 50% speed for external perimeters.
Heh, even with infill I just go up to 60mm/s
And temperature-wise, I like to hang around 220/215 for my filament, but I think you have often heard that those temp values should be figured out manually
