Cura V5.0 - Flexible Filament Profile TPU

in today's episode i'm going to talk about printing tpu you know that soft rubbery stuff on an under two under three under three pro they're all about the same and i have a new profile for version 5.0 of cura that's taken me a little bit of time to develop i'll explain it all on today's filament friday [Music] filament friday is brought to you by the generous donations of these patreon supporters if you follow my profiles you know that i have had a tpu profile for version 4.12 4.13 of cura and when i went to version 5 with those same profiles some problems showed up now i'm getting some of the best chep cubes i've ever printed so version 5 or acne engine is working really well with the tpu very very smooth on all sides but the top i get separation right at the edges so the skin layer is not molding into the inner layer so there's no overlap so i needed to adjust that and a few other minor things temperature things like that i did adjust speed i did adjust line with so there's several adjustments i made to the profile but the biggies were getting rid of those gaps they come on top every side i mean i literally can almost pull this thing apart so that was the first thing i needed to fix within the profile i went and adjusted the overlap or the outer wall inset and the skin overlap so once i set those to 0.2 millimeters then those gaps pretty much went away the next issue that popped up was stringing i've had stringing in my profiles in the past but nowhere near as bad as what i was getting with version 5. i don't know why but i was getting really bad stringing so as a test print i printed this this is a cable holder you can monitor the side of a bench and then hang all your cables from it but it's really like a retraction test because it's got these gaps in it and on one side it's really really clean but on the other side on the back side where the movement is oh it's really bad string in fact it's like a wall of string so i couldn't put up with this so i had to fix this and i actually did after a lot of testing i got it down to very little stringing and not zero but very little but i had to go to real high retraction now in the past i never put retraction into my tpu profiles i just accepted there's going to be some stringing because i didn't want to clog the nozzle but what i've found is i can retract quite a bit and still not clog the nozzle let me explain why when you're printing with tpu and you're on a bowden setup like the ender three under three pro or under two pro here you're actually compressing the filament you know you can stretch it one way but you can also compress it and then the bowden tube is like two millimeters inside diameter and this is only 1.75 so you're going to get some variation within the tube small amounts but that'll take up some compression so if you try to retract you're actually just pulling that compression out how much is compression and how much is actually moving the filament well that's the experiment and there's theory that you can go as much as the length of the nozzle as long as you stay within the nozzle with the hot part of the filament then you're fine because you're not getting into the ptfe tubing that is right on top of the nozzle once you get into that gap that's when you start to have problems so i measured the nozzle and the nozzle measured just over 13 millimeters so i put my max at 12 millimeters i wasn't going to go any bigger than 12 but i actually found i could go that big now that 12 millimeters is a max and that is the retraction distance in millimeter so some of it is reducing the compression and some of it is actually moving the filament how much is which well it really depends on the filament you're using i'm using very flexible filament and so it's working fine because there's a lot of compression if you have a tpu which isn't real flexible reduce that number a lot i use a five to six millimeters on pla so i would drop down to about that value on the the stiffer ones so it's something you have to adjust in the profile to match the filament that you're using if you're printing soft tpu on an ender 2 pro under 3 or into 3 pro the extruder has a gap that the filament connects escape and so i showed this in a video many years ago of how you can fix it with just a 3d print so let me show you that now here's a new extruder base i printed this with my extra fast profile and i inserted a ptfe tubing for the gap it also has designed and thread so you can screw in the coupling the ptfe tubing is about 14 millimeters long and the end of it is cut to a point like an arrowhead it just slides in until it presses against the wall at the back and it fills that gap between the gear and the idler to install it remove the coupling for the ptfe tube then remove the idler arm by loosening the screw you can pull the spring out and it's insert now i tighten the screw so i can get to all the screws of the base once you remove the three screws you can lift it off the motor put those same screws into the new 3d print and tighten all three screws that holds the motor in place now put the arm back on the original arm and the original spring tighten that screw and then make sure it pivots then put the coupling back in i had to use a wrench to finish tightening it and now this thing is perfect it fills the gap and it works great i did print many of these prints on this machine with the stock extruder it's a flexible filament i got on amazon really cheap and it's a little stiffer so i had no problem with this thing printing i had only one time works to escape the extruder but this ninjaflex which i printed some this will escape it's just too soft so that's where this extruder came in now luckily i have two machines so i put it on one so i could test them side by side now you can leave this on you can print with pla or any other filaments it's fine in fact that way you don't have to worry about if it wears out you can just print a new one but if you just have the stock machine you don't want to print that you can use that with most tpus i'll put a link in the description below to a 3mf file which contains this sample print the slicing profile for tpu and my machine profile so you could load that as a project copy everything i did and see how it works for you now you don't have to keep that machine profile you can delete it but you'll have the profile work with any creality machine or clone if you start with a creality machine profile so make sure you load it as a project it's free to download try it out let me know how it works for you if you like what i'm doing here maybe check out some of the videos that are popping up if you want to help support the channel patreon is one way and if nothing else click on that fill in the friday logo and subscribe i'll see you next time right here for filament friday

Channel: CHEP

Views: 82,763

Keywords: Free Cura V5.0 Flexible TPU Filament Profile and More!, Cura 5.0, cura v5.0 download, Cura V5.0 TPU, Printing Flexible Filament, TPU profile, cura profiles, cura profile for ender 3 v2, cura profile for ender 3 pro, cura profile settings, cura profiles for ender 3, cura profile location, cura profile import, Filament Friday, CHEP, 3D Printing, 3D Print, CHEP CUBE

Id: sGxewzACO9g

Length: 6min 50sec (410 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 15 2022