Has anyone tried material with shore hardness of less than 95A on the ultimaker 3?

[ArthurG 0]

I need to print models of a kidney and bladder which would require flexible material. Is it possible to use something with 85A like ninja flex in the Ultimaker 3? 

[kmanstudios 943]

I have printed NinjaFlex on the UM3E. I had no issues other than trying to tweak the settings for a clean print. Of course I was very new. But that should be encouraging if a noob got it to work ?

[fergazz 53]

Are you sure that you need to print these organs flexible? Which is your propose for that? I printed a lot of organs and bones for educational propose with materials like PLA and PETG (CPE and other co-polyésters). It is actually much easier to paint. I believe that flexibes are more usefull, in that area, to make a mount for fit prosthetic stuffs but to visualize it have worse apparence and you need to print really slow. 

 

In my opinion printing flexible materials in a bowden setup, with bigger retraction settings and more friction inside the bowden tube, is trickier than in a direct-drive printer. The easier solution is print Semi-flex materials around 98A shore. If you want less flexible than 95A shore the best solution to make it reliable and keep faster prints (from 20mm/s to 40mm/s or even up to it) is upgrading the feeder with a Bondtech extruder or similar stuffs (additing more torch) wich will provide you to increase the speed and decrease retraction distance settings. Bondtech just released, last month, extruders for UM3 printers, check this out: http://shop.bondtech.se/en/extruders/ddg-extruder-for-ultimaker-3.html. You can find more info about those extruders here in the forum, lot's of people are using it in UMO, UM2 and UM2+ printers with an awesome performance dealing with all kind of flexible stuffs.

 

Bondtech QR video: 

 

Edited June 15 by fergazz
video link

[ArthurG 0]

Thanks that is actually quite encouraging.