Ninjaflex and PEI

Heyo!

With the awesome new PEI sheets out on the TAZ5, it’s likely that some folks will be printing ninjaflex on it pretty soon. Ninjaflex sticks a bit TOO well to PEI, and it you’re not careful, you can damage the PEI trying to get parts off. Here are a few suggestions to keep that from happening :slight_smile:

If you’ll be printing with Ninjaflex a lot, the best way to go is to get another glass bed plate that you can swap on when printing with ninjaflex. TPU sticks great to a cool glass, so you won’t be needing another heater or any tape. This is how we print with flexystruders in house. Something like this should do nicely (https://www.lulzbot.com/products/borosilicate-glass-bed-300mm-x300mm).


An easier option for those that won’t be doing enough flexy-printing to justify a second bed plate is to cover the PEI with painters tape. The ninjaflex will separate from the painters tape pretty well, and it forms a nice barrier to protect your PEI.

Hope that helps
-bam

bam, I am not familier (yet) with the TAZ5 PEI beds. I mount my PEI to borosilicate. When I need to print NinjaFlex, I simply flip the plate over so the glass side is up. Any reason you can’t do that on the TAZ5? Or are the TAZ beds an integrated heater on one side and the PEI on the other?

cheers,
Michael

Right on here, the TAZ 5 bed is a sandwich of heater pad - borosilicate glass - PEI. This is mostly done to reduce the moving mass of the bed, but getting rid of the removable interface between the glass and the heater also helps the thermal transfer quite a bit.

cheers
-bam

That makes sense. Is there some form of heat dissipator like aluminum in the sandwich? I am jumping onboard with a KITTAZ after several years of delta printers. I started with Cartesians of course (Huxley and a home brew). On the deltas, the bed is stationary so I use a 1/8" aluminum plate to spread the heat evenly. The heater is a PCB type. The KITTAZ doesn’t come with the PEI bed so that will be the first thing I’ll have to do.

cheers,
Michael