I don’t 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. Don’t forget that they are consumables.
And if you do print aggressive abrasive materials, remember to either get a super expensive hardox nozzle, or just throw them away after each print. Woodfiber will murder any nozzle.
Gotta say though, your nozzle mostly looks dirty, not worn out (much)
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
Yeah, 70 bucks buys a LOT of disposable ones though. It’s probably worth it at some point, but not at my amount of abrasive filament use.
Yeah, you could get hundreds of cheap nozzles for $70. I’ve bought packs of 10 nozzles for 74 cents. That’s almost a thousand nozzles I could get instead of one $70 tungsten one. Or maybe “only” 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.
If you need to replace a cheap nozzle after each medium-sized print with abrasive filament, then I’m 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.
Forget about tungsten, get yourself a Diamondback nozzle They’re pretty much indestructible regardless of the hardness of the filament! Ask our boy Zack over at Voidstar Labs
Bought one of these a while back, and it’s 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 don’t even use abrasives, mainly just matte PLA.
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 you’ll no longer just want to shrug and throw away your current nozzle if it clogs badly.
Periodically, not sporadically
Thanks for the notice! It’s now changed in the title.
I’m no native speaker and thought it was a synonym to “From time to time, when you feel the need to”.
Changing nozzles is important as they are consumables, but all of your high quality close up shots are showing a practically unscathed nozzle under a lot of gunk (the picture of the back end of the nozzle has a big chunk of cooked plastic that will pretty easily scrape off), if you cleaned it you’d probably be just as well off as with the new nozzle
Wouldn’t it be better to replace them regularly by some metric, uses, time, etc?
Yes, but that is also going to require a ton of extra effort to track and assumes the nozzles themselves wear consistently. There would probably also need to be modifiers based on materials used, and even brands. For a professional print farm or a business trying to squeeze every last dollar out of the operation, this might be worth it. For a hobby where we expect a lot of waste? Eh, fuck it, just replace it when prints start going south.
I just experienced this for the first time. I has having to print slower and slower to get the filament to flow enough not to print skippy and stringy. Finally, the gears in the print head started skipping. I took the whole print head apart and found nothing wrong. Switched to the spare hot end that came with the printer and its printing like new again.
