So, I have Had my Ender V3 Plus for a few Months. I have been printing Pla with good results. TPU however has been a nightmare. At first, using the default settings, it did print but with terrible quality. Very stringy and blotchy. I ended up moving the spool holder to the top and feeding the tpu directly into the print head instead of using the tube. I tweaked a bunch of settings and got some better results, BUT, NOW, about every time I print with TPU I it clogs in the nozzle and the extruder starts making a clicking noise and I have to stop the print. I basically can’t print with TPU at this point. I have tried temps from 215 up to 235. I have tried retractions for .4 to 2 mm. I have tried speeds down to 15 mm/s. What’s up here? Any help would be appreciated.
TPU is pretty temperature dependent. Print a temperature calibration and you will see that ±5°C can make a big difference, the calibration built into Orca is good. Retraction should not be greater than 1mm, I normally run with 0.8mm, I do that on my Enders, Qidi’s and Snapmaker. My favoured brand for TPU in Pinuoto but Creality seems to make nice TPU. I have some Tinmorry but it isn’t as good.
Brad, after the TPU issue, is printing PLA still ok?
Do you notice any binding or that clicking sound?
For me, I have a spool of really horrible PETG.
I tried to use the special config stuff to configure the printer for THIS particular spool, hoping that it would just work. On any printer, this spool of PETG just is horrible.
So I dried it with my Creality dual dryer thingy, hoping that that would “fix” the horrible print quality. It did help A LITTLE BIT.
So this is when I decided to go to the other Plus printer and try the config stuff.
This was a serious fail. What came out were just splotches and blobs of the stuff and not that much of it either.
This is where that clicking started.
The nozzle was clogged big time.
I tried to use the long pin but when it finally went through after a lot of pressure, it was still tight.
I took apart the extruder to see if there was any clog in the gears. Nope. They were fine.
I took out the nozzle itself and found that it was completely clogged! From the tip to the top! Yes, it was clogged right up into the heat break part!
I used a drill bit to try to reem out the plastic. This worked a bit.
I tried using my hot gun to melt the PETG still inside. SOME came out.
But no matter what I did, I could not get it cleaned out completely.
I replaced the nozzle with a new one and tested with PLA and all was well.
So I wonder, if in your case, the TPU did kind of the same thing. Perhaps it’s clogged the entire nozzle.
Just some ideas.
in my expirience with this printer I found it is not able to print TPU with .1mm layer.
Always getting the Clicking and Curling inside the Extruder.
With .2 Layer it runs smooth (I am using the Creality TPU 230 preset)
TPU isn’t suitable for fine details anyway
Neuroplant
My V3SE with a 0.2mm nozzle quite happily prints TPU, must be something different between a sprite extruder and that on a V3.
So I am new to printing on this Ender 3 V3 Plus as I have a OG Ender 3 that I’ve printed on for small projects over a few years but not a lot of experience actually messing with settings and printing other than PLA.
With that said: I am having the same issue when trying to print on my V3 Plus, printed a few small projects with TPU and once it finished the second small print it clogged and it’s been frustrating ever since that first time.. The print quality is not what I expected ether!! I can’t find the root cause of the clocking noise, I changed to metal gears and didn’t fix anything!!??
So I ordered a dual filament dryer as I’ve heard that helps with prints and hoping that makes a difference. So any more helpful suggestions!? Tips? And general advice on how to set up this printer to help with printing different types of filaments is greatly appreciated!!
Brad here. So, after a bunch of trial and error, I got TPU to “kind of work”. When I first put in the tpu and extrude, I have to turn the extrude temp up to about 240 or 250 C in order for it to flow and not jam. Also on the first layer I have to print hot. for the rest of the print I print at about 230, BUT I have to print slow. The prints still don’t look that great. I would appreciate any other tips.
I know I am late to this thread, but I just spent a day trying to print TPU 85a and here’s what I have found…
Summary:
Printer - Ender 3 v3 Plus, Filament - Siraya TPU 85a (from Amazon)
- Dry the filament
- Use a short amount of PTFE tubing to feed the filament from a top mounted spool
- Started with filament manufacture recommeded settings, use Orca slicer calibation test (temp and retraction), bumped speeds up until quality went down.
Details:
The two biggest thing were using a few inches of PTFE tube (I ust cut about 1.5 in off the stock tubing) and made sure its sitting all the way in the nozzle (I had to make sure mine was in all the way a few times). The other thing was putting my TPU in a filament dryer for a while. I put mine in for 5 hours. I started with the filament manufature recommended settings and tweaked them with calibaration test in Orca Slicer (mainly the tempture and retraction test). After that I bumped the speeds up with a small calibration cube until the quality went down. The Orca retraction calibration is a good model to use. Its small and quick to print. I hope this helps.
I’m about to start using TPu so I’ll follow your advice 