Mini and Taulman Bridge

Hi All,

I hope someone can help. I’ve had my mini for about 3 weeks now and its been working great so far but I’ve only been printing with PLA. I’ve just started a print using Taulman Bridge as I need a part with some strength but I have a coupleof questions:

I am using Cura and the default profile for Taulman Bridge.

  1. When the print starts, the first couple of layers are really rough and it looks like the filament is bubbling up, as if it is cooking! Once it gets to the 4-5th layer it seems ok however. Is this bubbling normal and should I worry about it?

  2. The reel that the Bridge comes on is quite small and while its rotating, the filament comes off the edges causing a tangled mess, so I have to stand by it while it prints to keep it untangled! Are there any clever tricks to stop this happening?

Any help greatly appreciated :slight_smile:
Jason

Has the nylon been out of a sealed container with desiccant (silica gel) more than 24 hours? Nylon is extremely hydroscopic and can absorb enough water out of the air even at moderate humidity levels in 24 hours to cause lots of bubbling and spitting when it heats up in the nozzle. You may need to dry it out in an oven and then build yourself a dry box. I got a plastic water tight ammo box from amazon, glued in a spool holder, printed out and filled up a desiccant box, then screwed in two bowden connectors so I could feed straight from the dry box when printing and then just put the other end of the bowden tube back into the dry box when not printing.

Here’s a video on another example for making a cheap dry box to store nylon in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY5n9q-wS7k

Just an update on this…

I’ve printed a new spool for my Nylon (out of Nylon) which has much better airflow so I can dry it better, however, the final parts of my spool have come out much better than the first few parts of the spool and I have no clue why!

The last part I printed last night was not so good but usable but I needed another 5 of these parts so I set them to print this morning and they have printed much, much better. All I did was switch off the printer (left Cura running), switched it back on this morning and printed the parts. Has anyone got any clue to why it now prints better? I guess the only thing that might have changed is the room temperature, that is all!

I just bought some of this Taulman Bridge filament as well I have yet to try it out but to chime in it sounds like room temp could be a problem but echoing what has been said already the humidity of the room must have a large impact with printing this filament successfully…I might look into a filament box with some beads as suggested.

Possibly guide the 3mm filament from said box directly to the extruder - just before the extruder idler with some 3mm ID PTF tube. This would reduce the amount of moisture, from any source, that the filiament is exposed to In addition add purging a few extra mm before the print starts? just some thoughts on dialing in this stuff which I will be working on shortly.