In my experience different types of nylon vary a lot in the amount of moisture they absorb. The ultimaker brand nylon prints pretty easy imho. I never dried it but I keep it in a box with descendants. Even during printing. I've also used samples of other brands and found some to be very difficult. It also matters where in the world you live... I'm not in a very humid place so that also helps ofc..
When you material gets to wet you can usually hear it when printing.
I knew there was something I forgot to mention...I don't believe moisture is the issue. We keep the nylon stored in vapor barrier bags with desiccant. When extruded, the nylon doesn't show any of the tell tale signs of moisture, e.g., bubbles, popping noise, wisps of smoke/water vapor, etc. While we are located in the muggy North Carolina, we are in an academic library whose HVAC/climate control is outstanding due to the nature of our collections.
In this case, I'm more inclined to think that the filament itself sucks, or we need to do a better job of adjusting the filament profile.
Don't mess with the feeder. It's almost always a problem at the other end (the print head) that causes the grinding.
Two possibilities:
1) Maybe you have too many retractions. I'm thinking this virus might have many "islands" on a given layer? If true there may be so many retractions that it's grinding up the filament for that reason. I like to keep this down to 10 retractions for any spot of filament. To do that set maximum retraction count to 10 and set minimum extrusion distance to your retraction distance (probably 4.5mm - just use 4.5mm if you don't know what it is).
2) Maybe you just have too much pressure in the head. Try printing at half speed. Yes it will take almost twice as long but better than a failed print and you will learn something (whether it's grinding because there's too much pressure in the print head). You can just do this change in the TUNE menu on the printer. Or in cura.
MariMakes posted a topic in UltiMaker Cura,
ArunC posted a topic in UltiMaker 3D printers,
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geert_2 558
I have never printed with nylon, so I am guessing here. Nylon is *very* susceptible to moisture absorption. In injection moulding it is known that in only a few hours, it can absorb so much moisture from the air that production is impossible. So the material has to be dried well, and kept dry during the whole process.
Could this also be the problem in your setup?
For printing nylon, you would first need to dry the spool in a temperature controlled oven. And then store it in a fully closed box with rotating spool holder, also *while printing*. With only a little opening for the filament to exit. Also, put a big bag of desiccant in that box.
There have been talks about several proposed models in this forum, some time ago. Maybe you could find them back? Big food boxes could be a good starting point. Or dedicated machines (I don't remember their names).
But as said, this is guessing.
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