Priming Tower

[mdjohnson 0]

My priming tower seems to consistently get knocked off part way through the build. The base stays adhered to the glass plate, but the tower comes apart. This causes a huge birds nest of PVA/Nylon when printing and sometimes causes the print to fail because the strings of PVA create inclusions in the next layer of nylon (or PLA or ABS).

Suggestions?

[neotko 1,417]

Increase avoid crossing distance. Or something alike.. Can't remember the name of the option. It will force for pva to take longer path and avoid going from a to b directly. Also while isn't always the best in terms of material used, increasing some options of the support generation like horizontal expansion and other that makes the supports interconnected will help the travel paths to stay away from the print part. Go to supports and unlock the many hidden options and read the help one bynone. There are many options that can help more or less to solve the problem.

For the tower falling down. I use yo increase the tower flow % (hidden option by default) to increase the volume of material deposited to get a stroger bond). Also you could move the tower (by changing manually the x/y position) so the tower 'fuses' with the PVA support, making it a much more robust tower.

I don't have photos here but will try to upload them tomorrow.

Oh also using Z hop (even 0.2mm) helps to have less force hitting your tower. But the main issue of the tower can be that it's a bit small and needs more material so all layers bond properly.

Edited December 9, 2016 by Guest

[neotko 1,417]

Btw pva doesn't work with ABS. It just doesn't stick one to the other.

Edited December 9, 2016 by Guest

[bagel-orb 61]

The obvious answer is to not print a prime tower. You'd be amazed how far you can get without one!

Cura 2.4 has the option for a hollow prime tower, with more controlled wiping. It also comes with more temperature controls, which can further reduce oozing if printing without prime tower.

[kan4o 0]

I have a similar problem. I'm printing PVA + Nylon. I print a raft with nylon and after that (5th layer) it starts to print PVA support. The problem is, that between 7th and 11th layer the printer doesn't print on the prime tower and when it does print on the 12th layer it doesn't adhere to it and everything becomes stringy from there on. Can somebody suggest some workaround?

[gr5 2,167]

Strange. I did not have this problem when printing pva and nylon with a raft. It showed that it was not printing the tower in layer view?

[kan4o 0]

Exactly, the path of the print head doesn't go to the tower. This is with layer height of 0.06mm. Mysteriously, when I changed the height to 0.15mm all was fine and it showed that the head was printing tower in the first layers. Still haven't tried it with the printer though.

[ultiarjan 1,223]

I have a similar problem. I'm printing PVA + Nylon. I print a raft with nylon and after that (5th layer) it starts to print PVA support. The problem is, that between 7th and 11th layer the printer doesn't print on the prime tower and when it does print on the 12th layer it doesn't adhere to it and everything becomes stringy from there on. Can somebody suggest some workaround?

 

no idea whats goes wrong with the tower... but I had good result printing both the raft and support in PVA (with Nylon+PVA)

[kan4o 0]

Even if the raft is PVA it still doesn't go to the tower between these layers. I'm printing it with the 0.15mm resolution and it's ok for now (it's around the 10th layer).

 

 

I have a similar problem. I'm printing PVA + Nylon. I print a raft with nylon and after that (5th layer) it starts to print PVA support. The problem is, that between 7th and 11th layer the printer doesn't print on the prime tower and when it does print on the 12th layer it doesn't adhere to it and everything becomes stringy from there on. Can somebody suggest some workaround?

 

no idea whats goes wrong with the tower... but I had good result printing both the raft and support in PVA (with Nylon+PVA)

 

[fabreax 15]

A solution is to disable the prime tower ! (https://ultimaker.com/en/community/25807-cura-build-volume-for-ultimaker-3?page=1&sort=#reply-168662)

[BasHamer 2]

Similar issues here, my prime tower snaps after some time. To begin there is crap building up on one side of the tower, then it finally snaps when it is caught on a head and it builds a mess (usually also covering the print heads, that is a far bigger issue.)

Trying a non- primer tower version now, I did one before but I'm worried I did a crappy job cleaning the head before hand and the PVA head got clogged.

Edited March 10, 2017 by Guest

[tomnagel 126]

Maybe you should switch to Cura 2.4. Prime tower has been disabled for all profiles. Oozing has been suppressed with fancy temperature tricks.

As always I advise: use the default profiles, and use UM filament. The combination performs very good!