Ninjaflex on the Taz 6

Hi, first post on this forum, i hope someone can help. We are printing replacement carburetor parts for carburetors that haven’t produced in 50 years. The part shown is a replacement for a Mopar accelerator attachment. We print these in batches of 25. These were printed on a Taz 6 using Lolzbot Cura version 21.08 from the ‘quick print’ menu and saved to an SD card. The first batch came out fine ( the ones on the left ) , the other ones are on right are from the third test. The second batch was somewhere in between the two in quality but greatly degraded from the first, that’s why we only ran 2 of them as a test.
We cleaned the nozzle with eSun cleaning filament but it didn’t make any difference. We are stymied why the change in the prints. The print takes 11 hours to complete, we were wondering if Ninjaflex is hydroscopic and may have absorbed water as it was printing. I could not find anything conclusive about water and Ninjaflex on the web.

Any help or suggestions or advice would be appreciated

Thanks
Larry
Daytona Parts Co.

Larry,

I researched this a few months ago — everything I read suggested that Ninjaflex products were not affected much by water absorption. However, the artifacts in your print look exactly like artifacts I have seen in other filaments that have absorbed water.

My recommendation would be to place your spool of ninjaflex in a 65C oven for 6 hours drive out any moisture, then retry a print (maybe with 6 or 8 instead of 25, to decrease test time). If those come out without anomalies, then moisture was the issue!