I donโt print any abrasive materials at all. Pretty much only normal PLA and PETG.
I noticed, that my print quality gradually went down quite a bit, especially in the last few prints. I had a lot of stringing, weird blobs, and scarred surfaces.
Now, the print quality is as good as it should be!
They are dirt cheap. You can get a set of 10-15 generic ones, in different sizes, for only a few bucks. Donโt forget that they are consumables.
This solution to abrasive filament is a tungsten nozzle or one of the ruby tip ones. The cost is a bit expensive but with a tungsten nozzle you might be one and done
Forget about tungsten, get yourself a Diamondback nozzle Theyโre pretty much indestructible regardless of the hardness of the filament! Ask our boy Zack over at Voidstar Labs
This is what I did. I have not had to change nozzles since.
I will say, however, that this will definitely prompt you to git gud at cleaning nozzles, and inventing jigs and tools for doing so, because youโll no longer just want to shrug and throw away your current nozzle if it clogs badly.
The link I sent does have material property comparisons with most other nozzle materials, including tungsten carbide.
But, given that theyโre trying to sell the Diamond nozzles in the first place I would take all those values with a grain of salt.
Bought one of these a while back, and itโs been great. Yeah, you can get hundreds of cheapo nozzles for the price, but not having to deal with increasingly shitty prints and nozzle changes has made it worthwhile for me, at least. I donโt even use abrasives, mainly just matte PLA.
Yeah, 70 bucks buys a LOT of disposable ones though. Itโs probably worth it at some point, but not at my amount of abrasive filament use.
If you need to replace a cheap nozzle after each medium-sized print with abrasive filament, then Iโm thinking print quality will suffer towards the end of a larger print (like >250g, but definitely >1kg). Not having to replace nozzles mid-print makes the $70 nozzle seem like a better deal. Depending on what you print and how much you print, of course.
Yeah, you could get hundreds of cheap nozzles for $70. Iโve bought packs of 10 nozzles for 74 cents. Thatโs almost a thousand nozzles I could get instead of one $70 tungsten one. Or maybe โonlyโ 800 nozzles if I factor in a pessimistic shipping cost too.
EDIT: Checked the price I paid and it was even cheaper than I remember. Edited my calculations.
And after a while, you can melt all those nozzles into an ingot of whatever it is made of and show off the weight to others.