UM2 Aluminum Insulator - What Not To Do

[solid-print-3d 30]

Like many others, My Teflon insulator is sadly deformed...

I had ordered one 9 days ago, but somehow, they forgot to ship it out until I called, an honest mistake I'm sure, but I'm having soooo much trouble with it that I had to do something so I can continue printing!

Enter the hair-brained idea of turning a new insulator from aluminum

Simple enough. Turned it using open source files for dimensions. Fit nice, installed great.

I knew that the aluminum was going to draw a lot of heat from the nozzle, so I added one of the "quick and dirty" fan flow redirects (in other words a little piece of metal that makes more air flow across insulator) I didn't want to spend a whole lot of time coming up with a cooling solution until I actually tried the aluminum insulator.

Now for the test.

Fed new filament...seemed to work great. Started a print...not so great. It laid down about 50mm of skirt before it just jammed.

Took it apart... This is what the filament looked like. It totally conformed to the entire length of the aluminum insulator. There is NO retracting or changing this filament!

While I did feel a little defeated that my pretty little aluminum insulator SUCKED, I had to press on to get the machine up and running. I decided to cut some material off the base of the Teflon insulator to get me through the week. Here is a shot of the Teflon insulator. You can't really tell from the photo, but the opening around the base is larger than it's supposed to be.

I chucked it to the lathe and cut aprox 2mm off with a very sharp cutoff tool.

I reinstalled, and everything is working OK now.

 

Obviously, it's still a screwed up little piece of Teflon, but it's working now, and should hold until my replacement comes.

 

 

[ignace-de-keyser 1]

Thats too bad! Great effort nonetheless, I might make one out of concrete, terra cota or stucco when my teflon insulator starts to fail, which are if I believe a little less heat conductive.

 

[kris 29]

I think friction has to be considered as well. Teflon has very little of that...

 

[takei-naodar 0]

The ´Friction itself was probably not the problem.... atleast not the biggest one..... the aluminium if properly treated would also have a low friction.... not as low as teflon but still low enough. The biggest problem was that the aluminium insulator got to hot , allowing the material in it to get warm enough to get squished to the inner diameter of the insulator and through this increasing the friction manyfold.

 

[xeno 108]

I had my Peek melt when I just started out with my UM1,

While waiting for a replacement, i made one from dense wood, this worked for several days until it cracked from the heat :cool:

 

[cleven 4]

I was speaking to someone about this, it may have been in the other posting or not, but we discussed having the material aluminium/metal. We discussed the heat transfer differences. This heat transfer rate would cause the nozzle volume to increase as you increase the heat higher into the filament. Also ptfe has a very low friction coef, and is somewhat flexible and can force material through if an issue arrises.

I think any material which resists heat and heat transfer would be great

 

[Dim3nsioneer 558]

I think any material which resists heat and heat transfer would be great

 

Call it diamond...

 

[furball 0]

This material 'PEEK' might be suitable? http://www.directplasticsonline.co.uk/PEEKRod%20The%20data%20sheet%20looks%20interesting.

[cleven 4]

Made one out of peek, works ok, but the friction is higher than PTFE.

See here;

http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/7024-teflon-spacer-replacement/

I also made one out of Torlon. They all were relatively the same for me.

 

This material 'PEEK' might be suitable? http://www.directplasticsonline.co.uk/PEEKRod The data sheet looks interesting.

 

[Anders Olsson 136]

I was inspired by the attempts to make a metal spacer so I came up with this thing today:

It has been printing for five hours now with like 1000 retracts and has been working perfectly so far. (printing ABS at 260C)

I will take it apart tomorrow for some improvements and inspection.

 

[solid-print-3d 30]

I was going to go ahead and turn one like that. What are you using to keep pressure on the insulator? Kind of hard to tell from the image... Awesome job Anders!

 

[Anders Olsson 136]

I used the fins from an old heatpipe-based PSU heatsink and put them on an aluminum pipe which happened to have the right dimensions..

I had a spring that could be cut down to fit where the old spring was.

Here are two more photos:

 

The last photo is taken after five hours of printing. I thought it would be full of ABS by then, but it was absolutely clean.

 

There is no guide for the bowden tube to align it with the hole of the aluminum pipe and I think it draining most of the available heating power from the nozzle when running at 260C.

But it worked fine with ABS.

I will try to improve the design a bit today.

 

[nallath 1,124]

Actually with PLA friction is a problem. This is mostly why full metal hotends don't play well with PLA (but do work for ABS)

 

[muttstang 8]

what about a metal sleeve around the PTFE to help it maintain it's dimensions when hot. Don't run it all of the way down to the nozzle end so that there is a bit of thermal seperation.

 

[john-seaton 0]

I think I recall someone mentioning having a tungsten carbide spacer made? Any thoughts on that before I have one made?

My printer has the teflon one that came from the factory and the printer is about 2 moths old right now. I have almost 700 hours print time on it and from what I'm reading I'm way past due for a change. I don't want to have to buy one every 200 hours so paying to have a tungsten carbide one made would be worth it IMO if its slippery properties would hold true for PLA.

Thanks

John

 

[hafoora 1]

I made a steel coupler, since steel is an insulator but Im nervouse about trying it. anyone with experience making it out of steel, Aluminum is a good conductor, so it'll quickly trasfer the heat.