[UM PVA snapping in bowden tubes]

8 hours ago, willryan3 said:

PVA actually becomes more brittle upon water absorption. Try drying it out and keeping it dry when you are not using it.

My PVA lives in the material station. Material station doesn't get turned off  - except when I am pulling PVA fragments out of the tubes 🤪. But the material station should be taking care of the moisture problem, so I don't think that's an issue. Though I have no way of testing humidity.

[UM PVA snapping in bowden tubes]

I've notived that the PVA becomes noticably more ductile as it warms up.

 

With that in mind, the last couple of prints I've put the spool on the print bed at 30C for an hour or so. Both prints has succeed, but a sample size of two is not exactly data... I've looked through the material station doco, it makes not mention of temperature control. So I assume it doesn't.

 

Taking the spool out also gave me a chance to check the filament tip and sharpen it up. Sometimes it comes out of the extruder after depriming quite blunt, which has caused me issues in the past.

 

 

[UM PVA snapping in bowden tubes]

Greetings All,

 

I've had the UM PVA snap in the bowden tubes as the filament enters the coupler (the rectangular thing on the back of the material station inline with the bowden tube) a few times. I've been able to recover, but would rather not have to go through that process too often. I've seen a few posts about this, but not much by the way of fixes.

 

In both my failures they occured in the morning after the printer had been off overnight - material station is left on.

I am wondering what the working temperature of the PVA is? I know storage is between 0c and 30c. I am guessing that the temperature in the room is somewhere between 0c and 5c in the morning if everything has been turned off. Don't have thermometer, just going by the outside temperature.

How brittle does PVA become as it gets cold?

Are there other things that can effect the PVAs mechancial properties that would make it more likely to snap?

Also, the snaps occured at 50cm and 53cm from the end of the filament as it was being sent from the material station. Maybe that's helpful to know.

 

Thanks,

Robbo

 

[3rd Party materials, NFC & Filament change over]

Greetings All,

We recently purchased a S5 Pro bundle and I am in the process for getting it setup, received it last week. I have some questions about how the material station behaves and I haven't been able to find answers in the manual or the forum, so here goes.

 

I just had my first NFC fail -  this seems be not uncommon - after a bit of mucking around I understand I can safely set the filament type during loading to a generic version on the printer interface. My understanding is that the generic material settings are the same as the ultimaker materials by default.

 

My question is, if I have two of the same filament spools loaded (Ultimaker PVA) and one has the NFC fail, and has been set to generic PVA. What happens when the active PVA spool runs out? Will the printer treat them as the same? Loading the other spool and contimue with the print. Or will it throw an error and wait for me to do something?

 

My next question is, what is the difference between having the spool identified via NFC and entering the material type manually? From what I've read, other than making things simpler by identifying the material type, it only keeps track of the amount of filament remaining and the colour of the filament. Does the NFC have any other functions?

 

Finally, do any 3rd party filaments - I am thinking of materials alliance products - use the NFC tags or are the materials manually entered?

 

Thanks for your help,

Robbo