TPU ground to dust every time

[Jman15x 4]

Anyone else have this problem printing TPU on the s5 with the material station? 

 

You start a print, everything is all good, feeds though the Bowden tubes beautifully. Print is over and the station tries to recoil your filament but for whatever reason fails and grinds the everlasting heck out of your precious rubber string. WHY??

 

If you notice a problem feeders PLEASE STOP FEEDING for a few seconds until I can figure out what is going on. 

 

This is more of a rant than anything I doubt there is any way to fix the problem. It just irks me to throw away 3m of otherwise perfectly good filament EVERY TIME I print with TPU because my lower feeder doesn't have a brain. 

 

So then what happens is that it throws an error and I have to restart my printer to clear and then once restarted it thinks the material station bay is empty when in reality it is not and the filament is still going from the spool to the print head. And then decides the best course of action is to just literally continuously run, which of course does nothing unless you add heat to the print core because the filament is still firmly parked in the nozzle. 

 

The only way to avoid this whole mess then is to immediately unplug your s5 after the print ends. Next you run your power cable from the outlet directly to the s5 and avoid the material station (otherwise you get the infinite grinding effect). Next you manually heat your print core to 250ish to unpark the trapped filament. Then flip up the switch on the upper grinder/feeder to release tension, unplug the entire unit, yank the entire strand out of the system by hand and ravel it back onto the spool. 

 

All of that to get off a single TPU print with the s5 material station. Asinine...

 

/rant

[Travis7s 18]

I've noticed peculiar issues with TPU even without a material station. Half the time when unloading, the nozzle doesn't get hot enough to release the filament, so it grinds. I have to manually turn up the heat a bit then pull it by hand.

 

When printing "one at a time" it loves to flag the material as being empty in between parts. Not during a print, only before it starts on the next one. Theres no real pattern to this, sometimes I can print 16 parts in a row per plate, sometimes I need to hit the resume button for every part in a build.

[Jman15x 4]

16 hours ago, Travis7s said:

I've noticed peculiar issues with TPU even without a material station. Half the time when unloading, the nozzle doesn't get hot enough to release the filament, so it grinds. I have to manually turn up the heat a bit then pull it by hand.

That's probably the heart of the issue. I wish they would allow the users to have more control over these parameters. It would be such a simple fix. We should be allowed to adjust the parameters on our own equipment