First things first, my Kittaz is awesome. I’ve printed well over 2000 hours worth of good looking production parts on this printer. Over the course of that time I’ve had my share of breakdowns or issues like blown heater resistors and broken teeth on the small herringbone gear, but only recently in the last 500 hours or so have I started to have clogged nozzles. While attempting to clear one such clog I messed up the nozzle, which caused the parts to print poorly.
So I order a replacement nozzle, a 0.35mm nozzle like all Kittaz and Taz 4s came with. Comparing it to the old nozzle it looks a bit smaller, and when manually extruding the pipe of filament comes out smaller than I remember… Furthermore it seems to print parts with the gcode I’ve always used a bit differently…
My old nozzle had a 0.50 on the side. However, Kittaz and Taz 4 always had .35mm nozzles stock. Heck, lulzbot doesn’t even publish slicr profiles for a 0.5mm nozzle.
So apparently I’ve been printing with a 0.5mm nozzle for the last 3 years, while generating Gcode for a 0.35mm nozzle.
I honestly couldn’t care less except that the 25+ parts that I have in production will all need to be printed once, resized for fitment, and then reprinted once more for confirmation before I can print them in quantity again…
The only good to come of this is that I’m using the opportunity to switch to the hexagon hotend with a 0.5mm nozzle, which requires slight refitting of the parts as well. I’m hoping that the supposed faster printing with a larger nozzle is something that is more than just theoretical…