Adafruit tutorial on using 1.75 mm Filament

[LePaul 321]

I came across this today, interesting if you have a lot of 1.75 mm filament kicking around

 

[SandervG 1,521]

Well, if they say it is working.. I guess it is working.

But it is not what I thought/know/knew.

At the very least, with so much space in your bowden tube you'll retraction will suffer.

Let me know what your findings are @LePaul if you have given it a try.

[neotko 1,417]

It can work isn't  reliable. Sooner or later the filament will snap inside the bowden by the hysteresis and using 1.75 on a 3mm hotend kills the advantage of using 1.75 to have less dripping and retract less. And most important, the um2 knurted bolt will break in two the filament (spring too tight) or slip (too loose).

Edited November 14, 2015 by Guest

[Labern 774]

I have tried it and Retractions suffer a lot.

I did install the conversion kit from 3dsolex though which worked really great. it came with a 1.75mm bowden inside the 3mm bowden. I was able to find a way of gluing strips of bowden tube together and now just have a couple of bits at each end. this makes it nice, flexible and light.

the kit also came with PTFE coupler and nozzle block with the correct ID. 3dsolex doesn't have 1.75mm nozzles though so you need to get them from E3D.

Good for people who want an Ultimaker but prefer 1.75mm filament. unfortunately i don't have much 1.75 so couldn't experiment much

[neotko 1,417]

I don't know why the 3dsolex kit uses 2 ptfe since there's 6mm/2mm id ptfe's that work just perfect. I buy it to charlies3dt and it has a really nice 6mm and perfect centered 2mm id. I tried buying some on aliexpress and on one crappy shop in spain called kit3dblablasomething and both where a horrible waste of cash.

Glueing with special binary glue for ptfe works nice but from the two bowdens I did only one has survived 3months since if you do one bad atomic the force can push the inner ptfe free from the glue. Anyhow it's easy to glue it back again.

Edited November 15, 2015 by Guest

[LePaul 321]

Maybe I should follow-up with the gentleman in that Adafruit video and ask how well that configuration has worked over time?

I find it interesting since there could be users who want to upgrade to an Ultimaker and if there's a way they can use their existing filament, that helps.

[SandervG 1,521]

Well, @gr5 sells an upgrade kit, so it is possible.

But the video leaves the impression that you don't need to make any modifications and just feed 1.75mm filament.

[neotko 1,417]

The main issue using this method it's that pla/abs/whereveryouuse will flow up and down like a river of goo and will eventually burn, since there's room for the material to move freely and stay. So if you try to print something too hot for fast prints or just a 5-10h pla print you will have big problems and you will need more than constant atomic pulls. I tryed this path when I got my umo+ and the first kilo printed ok since I wasn't going faster than 50mm/s also the amount of dripping, bad retractions and filament snapped it quite huge. So yes it can work, but not as good as a correct mod or the stock system. Also the feeder tension it's quite high for 1.75mm filament and for high demand on retracts it will eat it so easy unless it uses a different tension system (IRobertI with different screw distance) or a better suited feeder bolt like a Mk7.