Ninjaflex on TAZ 6 w/Hexagon Hot End

I just tried printing with Ninjaflex ‘Midnight’ on an unmodified TAZ 6 with the stock Hexagon hot end. It worked quite well! The main changes in the settings that I use for printing PLA was to change the temperature to 232ºC and set the retraction to 3 and retraction speed to 20. Slowing down to 25mm/s makes a good print. I don’t mind the slower speed – chalk it up to ‘specialty printing’. I’m printing just one part at a time because at the 232C temperature, it tends to string between parts. Lowering the temperature to 220C made the print fail because the material doesn’t flow so easily and the filament starts to fold up under the hobbed drive due to the increased pressure at the nozzle. So the higher temperature allows the material to extrude with a low enough amount of force to keep the filament from folding. I use PVA glue stick on the bed because without it, it’s very difficult to remove from the bed. The glue stick makes it come off easily.

My settings:
Layer height: 0.3
Print speed: 25
Print temperature: 232C
Bed temperature: 50
Bottom layer speed: 30
Infill speed: 30
Top/bottom speed: 20
Outer shell speed: 20
inner shell speed: 24

Also, VERY important, in the Start G-code I changed the “E” value in line with the comment “suck up XXmm of filament” to E-1, then I changed “E” value in the line commented “extrude filament back into nozzle” to E5 (too large a value here causes the filament to fold up under the hobbed filament drive), and in the “expert settings” (Cura V.21.04) I set the skirt Line Count to 8 and Minimal Length to 700 to make sure the filament is extruding when the part starts to print. I’ll be updating Cura to V.2.6.66 soon (already using it on the Mini, but haven’t updated for the TAZ 6 yet), and I expect I might be able to improve the printing of flexible filament a bit more.