Taz 5: Can fan be used on high temp prints?

I’ve been troubleshooting an issue for many days with LulzBot support: When printing at 260C with the fan on (100%), the hotend temperature is dropping by around 15C. This ruins the layer adhesion of my material.

Can any other Taz 5 owners verify that the hotend should be able to maintain its temperature at this level even with the cooling fan on?

The simple answer is to run the fan at less than 100%. Pretty easy to do. Either do it in Cura, or you can turn down the fan manually on the LCD display on the printer, but you will have to do it every time if you chose the manual method.

The more complicated answer is to replace the standard 24v 30 watt heater with a 24v 40 watt heater. You may (or may not) have to re-tune the PID parameters after swapping out the heater.
Here is one on Ebay:
www.ebay.com/itm/331263442124
You need the pins:
Either female, digikey part# WM2510-ND
or male, digikey part # WM2517-ND
It depends on the type of connectors that are on your printer.

Bill D.

Thanks a lot. LulzBot thinks it should keep up, so I have an RMA issued to ship the WHOLE PRINTER in for diagnostics. Are you saying that your experience also shows that the heater is underpowered for high temperature prints with cooling?

I have trouble holding the high temps with the fan running 100%. Of course, I use the fan a lot less that the standard Cura profiles suggest. :wink:

Yeah… I notice a drop in hotend temp as the fan hits 100%. This is at an extrusion temp of 245C.

Try a max of 80-90% and see if that helps.

I taped some ceramic insulation felt around the heat block of the hotend with some kapton tape, and am now able to print at high temperatures with full fan - no problems at all. Not pretty, but very functional.