is going to be much less of a classic guide - because the basic process is the same for

every kind of filament. You strap it into your extruder, heat up the printer and then

print something out. Instead, I’m going to show you the five most important things

to keep in mind to successfully print with flexible filaments.

But before we start, what is this flexible filament anyways? The guys from E3D sent me

some Ninjaflex, which is a patented filament that’s based on thermoplastic polyurethane,

or short TPU. It’s often also simply called TPE, or thermoplastic elastomer. It is very

elastic, but isn’t really springy. Rather, it dampens movement a lot, but always moves

back into its original shape. There are a couple other varieties of flexible filaments,

like Filaflex or flexible PLA, and these tips mostly apply to all of them.

Tip number one: Align your hobbed bolt and the feed hole of

your hotend. When i started printing flexible filament, i could barely get it out any faster

than at snail’s pace or it would buckle in the extruder. That was because that tiny

misalignment of just about a millimeter between the center of the hobbed area and the feed

hole forced the filament into a curved path, which is one of the worst things for printing

flexible filament. So spend a little extra time getting your hobbed bolt to line up.

Also, you might notice that there is a teflon tube in my extruder, and that is

Tip number two: If you have a bowden-compatible hotend, or

even if you don’t have one, you can use a piece of bowden tubing to guide the filament

all the way from the drive gear or hobbed bolt into the hotend, as that reduces the

friction on the filament as it pushes against the side walls of the filament channel in

the extruder body and hotend. The E3D v6 makes that easy, as all 1.75mm v6es are essentially

a bowden version and you can use one continuous piece of tubing all the way from the drive

gear to the bottom of the heat sink. Tip number three:

The bowden tube trick works well for 1.75mm, but what about 3mm filament? Well, as it turns

out, 3mm filament is way more stable down the extruder hole, so if you have the choice

between a 3mm and 1.75mm printer, use the 3mm one for the flexible materials. Also,

long bowden tubes can be tricky. Tip number four:

A heated bed isn’t necessary, but it helps. My new favorite thing in 3D printing is regular

household glue stick, which is absolutely awesome, because it grabs on to your prints

as long as they are warm, but completely lets go once everything is cooled off. So for Ninjaflex,

set your heated bed to about 40°C and use a thin layer of glue stick as your bed topping.

Tip number five: If everything else fails, print slow. This

is especially true when you know that your printer works well with PLA or ABS, but you

just can’t seem to get the flexible stuff printing reliably. Remember, this is a completely

different class of raw material, so you might need to use completely different settings.

Generally, 40mm/s is already a pretty high speed for the flexible stuff, but you might

need to drop that as low as 5mm/s to get it printing properly. There’s no shame in doing

so if it gets your printed part out. Bonus tip! Because i apparently can’t count

to five. Calibrating your extruder the classic way

with flexible filament isn’t going to be much use. So use your tried-and-true settings

from your ABS or PLA profile and fine-tweak the extrusion multiplier as you go.

So that’s the most important things to keep in mind when you’re trying flexible filaments.

As far as the other settings go, it’s all cooking by the book: Extruder temperature

around 215°C and bridges an overhangs might be a bit harder to print.

So there you have it! Thanks for watching, make sure to like, subscribe and share this

or any of my other videos, and check out the survey in the video’s description to influence

which topics i cover next!