Comment on Newbie questions
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 1 year agoWhile we’re on the topic of newbie questions. I’ve been running my elegoo pro 3 off and on for a few months now. How will I know when to change out the nozzle? Meaning, are there symptoms of a bad nozzle I should look out for?
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yes. So, there are two general failure modes for nozzles which are either drastic and catastrophic or subtle and gradual.
You can have a sudden catastrophic nozzle issue most commonly by getting it clogged with something – dust, grit, metal debris, or any other material that won’t go molten at your printer’s extrusion temperature – usually settling on it from above. Printers with totally exposed filament paths like my old Qidi X-Plus are really bad for this, because crud can just fall right into the feed hole in the top of the hotend or even stick to the filament via static cling and get pulled right into the extruder along with the filament. If that happens you’ll notice sudden underextrusion.
Underextrusion is just not enough material leaving the nozzle. Or in extreme cases, none at all. It’s particularly noticeable on your first layer, where you can visibly see that the lines of material are not thick enough and eventually start to not touch each other anymore.
You can also roach your nozzle by crashing it into the build plate via manual control, getting your Z offset really wrong, sending mangled g-code to your printer, or as I once did by not realizing there was something stuck under the build plate causing it to sit higher and grinding the nozzle against it for an entire layer pass. Your nozzle is typically brass, and your build plate is typically steel… or glass… and in either case the build plate wins and the nozzle loses.
Over time you’ll eventually get burned molten plastic permanently baked into your nozzle and no amount of wiping, picking, or brushing will get it off. If this blocks the nozzle outlet it will cause problems. This happens over time, and the more dialed in your print settings are and the less stringing your printer produces the longer it’ll take to happen.
Gradual failure usually happens from just plain wearing the nozzle out. Having molten plastic forced through it will eventually erode the nozzle and slowly enlarge the hole in the end of it until it doesn’t produce the same extrusion width anymore. This will happen much faster if you use a soft nozzle (brass, copper) and abrasive filaments, which include not only composites with reinforcing stuff in them like chopped up glass fiber or carbon fiber, but also glow in the dark filaments (the glowy material is an abrasive powder), white filament (colored with titanium dioxide, which is an abrasive powder), glitter filaments (loaded with abrasive particles), wood effect filaments (filled with… you guessed it), or any other novelty material with some kind of particulate gumf in it.
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Thank you for explaining it so thoroughly. I’ll keep a look out for changing extrusion levels because I use the white pla, it probably has titanium oxide in it. My printer came with quite a few extra nozzles, I’m just afraid of fucking up the printer when I change it the first time so I’m avoiding having to do it.
TwanHE@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Even if you do wear out your nozzle slightly it probably still works perfectly fine if you change nozzle size/line width in the slicer. I printed a bunch of cf-asa on a brass nozzle since my hardened steel one hadn’t arrived yet. Started out as a .4 but became a .8 nozzle after about 500 grams of printing.
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
That’s good to know, I guess I have to start measuring the width now. I didn’t even think to get one of those measuring devices. Thanks.