It barely prints PLA and from what I heard TPU has a bit more friction then PLA (please correct my if I’m wrong). As the frame of my anet a8 is very craptastic, because I basically got it gifted as it was broken and I needed to power glue some parts together as the crappy plastic frame was party broken. So the frame is weak and it’s also the bowden tube variant where the bowden tube heavily limits printing speed where even regular PLA printing speeds are very slow. If I up the speed from very slow even a tiny bit, then the motor feeding the bowden tube skips the filament. (Shortening the bowden tube any more isn’t possible as it’s already as short as possible) Mounting the filament motor directly to the extruder isn’t really possible as the frame is so weak that it will literally tear itself apart if any more force is put onto it.
I know that printer is basically at the point of self disassembly and I will replace it soon, but not yet.
(PS And yes I do monitor it when it prints very closely via a webcam in case it does start self disassembling) (PS PS. I did upgrade the firmware to merlin so it does have thermal runaway protection)
actionjbone@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Yeah, older printers’ extruders had some trouble with TPU, but TPU use similar temperature ranges to PLA.
It’s worth a shot, at least.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
The other option is regular Pla. It’s flexible when thin. And I think he needs some stiffness to protect the cable from bending too much.