Has anyone designed an attachment to the spool holder to pass the filament through a sponge or something to clean it before it goes into the extruder?
-Keith
There’s a couple decent ones on Thingiverse that will do exactly that. http://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=filament+cleaner&sa=
Was hoping for one specifically designed for the Taz…
This one works good with the Taz- http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:492067
It sits right at the start of the feed tube.
Be careful of what you put inside the cleaner. Some people used sponge or foam made from crude oil and have filament gum up as it ends up rubbing off onto the filament and melting. Use natural (read real) sponge. Of course if your filament is known good quality and stored properly no cleaner is needed and only adds a point of possible failure.
Thanks, that one seems to be working great so far. I’m using a fine cell polyester sponge material and I pull through and cut off a 12 inch length of filament to try to eliminate any potential sponge crumbs when I first load it…so far so good.
I think the risk of extraneous debris somehow getting on the filament and clogging the little 0.35 mm nozzle is far greater than the risk of a micro piece of sponge from this device clogging the nozzle.
I think the designer offers the suggestion to put a drop of oil like sewing machine oil on the sponge to eliminate filament drag, but that’s not a problem for the direct drive TAZ 4…bowden extruder printers may suffer from this issue.
Edit: This worked on my extruder using IC3D’s ABS with no problem, but for some reason the extruder w/ Lulzbot’s ABS gnawed a groove in the filament due to the sponge’s friction. By feel it seems like the idler tension is the same on both extruders so I’m not sure if one filament is creating more drag than the other or if the idler tensions are significantly different even though they don’t feel like they are?