TAZ 5 purchase

General LulzBot TAZ
2

Hiya!

  1. You need a larger nozzle orifice to print flexible materials at a decent speed. You can achieve fine resolution with a 0.50mm nozzle/hot end- by printing at finer layer heights. It’s tempting to correlate nozzle diameter with print resolution, but it’s not needed. See this thread on printing with at 0.50mm nozzle at 0.05mm layer height: AO-101 Prints at 0.05mm

  2. You can, but it’s not recommended. We would have equipped the Flexystruder with a 0.35mm nozzle if we had found that it performed better. Stick with the 0.50mm nozzle.

  3. The Dually Flexy works well! https://www.lulzbot.com/products/lulzbot-taz-flexydually-tool-head

  4. The stock head can print with it- but you’re risking your hot end and nozzle. While carbon fiber filaments seem like a good idea, there hasn’t been much testing to see how they perform compared to the stronger nylon filaments. It may not be worth it/ as strong as you’d think:

A special note on Carbon Fiber Filament:
From: > Colorfabb.com

A special point of attention is the abrasive nature of the carbon fibers. In general these fibers will accelerate the nozzle-wear of brass nozzles, much faster than unfilled filaments. Therefore we recommend to use nozzle’s from Stainless steel or hardened copper alloys.

While it’s tempting to try using filament containing carbon fiber, many users are reporting trouble extruding after using that material, even from different vendors. We’ve seen people that wear out the inside of their nozzle, not to mention having lingering extrusion issues after switching to more common filament types.

One of the benefits of carbon fiber containing materials are it’s strength, similarly to good quality plywood. The interlocking long carbon fiber strands give the material a super-strong core. All the filaments we’ve seen so far however, don’t have that same kind of long carbon fiber strands, so your prints are similar to Oriented Strand Board (cheaper plywood with smaller fiber length), which isn’t as strong or as durable. That somewhat defeats the purpose of using carbon fiber materials.

We find that for applications needing high-strength printed parts Nylon is a great material. While a bit slower to print, the parts are much, much stronger.