Simple Measures To Prevent 3D Printing Issues From Happening

Why to change the print profiles?

It’s not a mandatory requirement to change the print profiles used before upgrading a 3D printer with Bondtech extruders.

But, if the capacity of the system is improved, shouldn’t the settings be adjusted to the new possibilities?

Find below descriptions and links to profiles that were tweaked by our Product Development Department to take advantage of all the skills and features our extruders provide.

We’ll be adding profiles to this list. Come back later if you didn’t found what you were looking for.

It is important to know..

… that profiles are highly material dependent. Slight shifts in composition or in conditions like room temperature and moisture may require profile tweaks.

Different materials, manufacturers, ambient conditions, and hardware setup may impact in the performance of the profile it self.

Bare in mind a printing profile is many times a sum of personal choices. The profiles available here should be taken as a starting point to be adapted by everyone to his personal preferences, materials availability, ambient conditions, and hardware setup (nozzles, hotends, …).

Why is bed adhesion so important?

The print bed is not only the base where the 3D printer will lay down the part, it is more the anchor surface that holds the part in place until printing is finished.

Forces like inertia (from bed movement), drag (from tip of nozzle), or contraction (from material cooling down) will counteract that stability along the whole printing process, and if these forces rise above the holding force, they will cause the part detachment.

There are several origins for part detachment:

• Bad bed levelling;
• incorrect bed temperature;
• not enough contact surface to bed;
• incorrect settings to build first layer;
• bad adhesion solution.

We will discuss each in more detail later in this article, but in what regards to bed adhesion solutions, it is important to know:

• Different print surfaces will require different adhesion solutions (eg. Glass requires glue or hair spray to grab PLA);
• Different materials will require different adhesion solutions (eg. Nylon does not adhere to PEI);
• Use the right bed adhesion solution to improve your chances of finishing prints with success.

Even if the bed is properly levelled, you’ll still need a proper adhesion solution. Not all surfaces are adhesion-ready but all of them, ready or not, need to be clean.

Below you can see what the manufacturers recommend you to use with the print beds they supply.

Why is a tighten nozzle so important?

The nozzle is a bottleneck in the filament path.The heat brake lets 1.75 or 2.85mm thick solid material in, and the extruder lets 0.4mm thick molten material out. When the extruder is feeding material into the hotend, it has to exert pressure to push material through the nozzle.

Under pressure the molten material will travel through every escape route possible. If the nozzle is not properly tightened to the hotend, the gap becomes an alternative escape path, partially replacing the nozzle tip.

You can identify this issue when a brownish crud may be seen around the top of the nozzle and bottom of the heat block. Most common results are under-extrusion and model contamination. More severe effects can be felt if the printer is left unattended and working for many consecutive hours.

It is important to know:

• the nozzle should be tighten at higher than working temperature (eg. 285°C using E3D’s V6);
• different hotends have different tolerances to torsion forces (E3D’s V6 will require you to firmly hold the heat block while tightening or untightening the nozzle. On the Mosquito you just need to rotate the nozzle);
• There is a recommended amount of torque required to tighten the nozzle.

For these reasons, you should use a proper calibrated Torque Wrench. The Wrench should collapse when the maximum recommended torsion force is exerted, so the nozzle is tight and the hotend is not damaged.

Below you can see what the manufacturers recommend you to use with the hotends we are supplying.