Hello everyone.
I have a Mini 2 with both the .5mm and .25mm micro extruders.
Specifically speaking on the micro extruder, I want some advice on how to make prints faster. I don’t know much enough yet to play with the parameters, and the first option that comes to mind is increasing the flow rate.
Any of you have experience with that?? Does it clogg??
When using the .5mm I’ve had no problem increasing it to 150%, but I don’t feel confident going beyond that.
Thank you for your advice!
Bottom line up front - if you want need that detail fast, get a resin printer.
Since you’re already mashing 2.85mm filament into a .25mm opening, there’s very little you can do. Keeping in mind that reducing the diameter by 2x decreases the area by 4x. The heaters in the SL and SE are the same, so while you might think that you should get the same volumetric flow, you run into the problem of backpressure.
Your biggest issue is probably going to be stripped filament with that single-gear trying to push that filament through such a tiny opening. Turning up the heat can help some, but that raises your possibility of heatcreep.
Swapping to a M175v2 hot end with a .25mm nozzle can help, since you’ll have the Bondtech dual-geared extruder, and 1.75mm filament will melt faster. The mosquito design is also better for combatting heatcreep too.
Agreed with Wrathernaut. Basically with the smaller nozzle orifice you are going to be able to get finer detail at the expense of speed. Lulzbot used to equip the early models with the budaschnozzle with a 0.35mm orifice where most others (Prusa, Makerbot, TypeA, Printrbot, etc.) came with a 0.4mm nozzle. With the introduction of the Hexagon with the original Mini and then the TAZ 5, they went to 0.5mm standard. In private discussions with R&D and tech support during visits to the factory, I learned that the primary reason for the increase in aperture size was to reduce the tech support cases caused by filament jams.
If printing less than 100% infill try cranking up the infill speed to 60-80