Arnitel

[rad]

Hello,

I got my Arnitel, flexible filament roll 1.75mm, 0.75kg, white yesterday together with my spare parts (2 new extruders sets)

My Experience so far with the flexible Arnitel: Absolut great.

I dont' have my printer that long and I am still a bit fighting with several issues and experimenting and improveing.

Forexample the normal green PLA I have to print with 240deg but with that high temperatur it comes out perfectly. Sort of strange but it is like that.

The normal white PLA I can only print when I reduce the retraction from 1.5mm to 0.5mm and after the Job is done it ALWAYS clogs the extruder. Whereas I can extrude it at 190 deg it also screams for higher temp.
Unfortunatly at higher temps white PLA starts to behave very very bad (truns brown and clogs the extruder very bad)

The Arnitel, flexible filament so far never cloged my old extruder no matter how I stopped and it's the same extruder that always cloged with the white PLA which is a big big positiv experience.

It extrudes with very well flow/stream on 220 and 240 deg. A bit too well.. the first time that I see that I have to reduce the temperature due to small material bumps at certain spots like an material overflow.

I just have a run at 200 deg now which so far looks great better than the 220 and 240 deg sample. less or now bumps and still no flow problems.

The surface it produces looks smooth, smoother than the normal PLA. The normal quality 0.2mm layer Arnitel print almost looks like a high quality normal PLA 0.1mm print.

I had to re-adjust my Z-Axis since the wobbeling became a dominat ugly surface quality killer now.
I believe my Z-Axis spindle isn't the most stright because I couldn't find a motor-top adjustment that had worked.
However I found a perfect solution for this:
I losened the Top completly the way that it gives in into the wobbeling (also the screw to the frame). My Z-Axis is now hold by the motor below and the nut in the Z-Bearing only. That eleminated any wobbling of the printing table completly!!! So if you have a bad Z-Axis spindle like me.. ..that's what helps perfect.

Arnitel seems to hold less well on the bed. It ripped my first part off during printing..not sure if the material shrinks a bit. I now print with 65 degree bed and with raft. (before I only used support)

The support is harder to remove due to the flexible nature you can not break it of. Of course you can rip it off more easy but there is more support material that keeps sticking on your part which you have to remove.
You have to pay attention to not rip out strings of your parts.

The extruder bolt for the filament feeding I had to tighten (3/4 turn) that it feeded well.
The flow has more difficult to stop..during printing it always makes the small thin wires/string this with 0.4mm retraction and with 0.8mm...maybe I have to go back to 1.5mm here ..dunno I will see.

The bad points:
- The filament spool has a larger hole than the normal so you have to adapt your selfmade spool holders.
- The filament is very expensive.

So my Conclusion
I think the Arnitel flexible filament is a very great filament. So far I love it.

For my tests I printed a ball and its like a bit harder rubber ball.

Also interesting if you strech the original filament it tightens to a thin see through string that is very though.. I couldn't rip it apart by hand. I used it to bind some printer cables together where the normal cable-binder looks ugly.

[rad]

Here are my Results:





The left ball is done at 220 deg and overworked. (normal quality, 0.2mm layers)
The right ball is done at 200 deg and fresh from the printer (normal quality, 0.2mm layers)

The balls are 40mm in diameter

The little bumbs didnt vanish at 200 deg..they become less thought.

This material can be realy well overworked with the right tools.
The normal PLA requires more for a good result.

One more positive point I found:
+ It doesnt smells that bad as the PLA does. It seems to hardly smells at all.

But one big negative point I also have to report:
- The filament on the filament spool is not prober layered and get's stuck in the spool itself. So you first have to testwhise spool out the material you gonna print and free every stucking or spool it on another spool if you dont want your print broken in the middle.
You have to pay attention not to drag too strong on the filament doing that else the filament becomes smaller like you know.

[Hugues]

That looks very good.

One newbie question here:
when you say "overworked", what do you mean exactly ?
You polished the ball with some tool ?

This material could not be sand blasted I suppose ?

[rad]

You polished the ball with some tool ?

Exactly.

I use this electro hand tool to work on the printed parts.
http://www.dremeleurope.com/gb/en/ocs/p ... C2%AE-8200
(Bought a flexible shaft too like some of the other sets have.)

I think sand blasting is much too strong for this. Sand blasting might work for the normal PLA.

Also with the tool above you have to work carefully not to remove too much material when dealing with the flexible plastic. But it goes very well much better than the PLA.

One thing however the polished ball losses some of it's brilliance. It's very smooth but not that glossy anymore.
Maybe I have to use finer polishing tools for the finish or put it in some hot water bath or something.

Byway I started a high quality print (0.1mm) test yesterday. Had it run for 2 hours (210 deg) just to see how it will look.
That seems to come out with an absolute perfect and awesome good looking surface I not even saw bumps.
However the fill flow wasn't that good.

p.s. I am from Switzerland too. German part. You can buy that tools in the Coop Bau+Hobby

[Hugues]

[quote="rad
I use this electro hand tool to work on the printed parts.
http://www.dremeleurope.com/gb/en/ocs/p ... C2%AE-8200
(Bought a flexible shaft too like some of the other sets have.)
...[/quote]

Hey Rad !

I do have a Dremel. Which tool tip have you used on the Arnitel ? The cylindrical sand band as pictured below ? I've got that one.

As for the sand blasting, i' have a small sand blasting cabinet so i'll try some various materials. I have the regular sand, but this one will probably be too agressive. But I have also small glass shells and especially crushed hazelnut shells, maybe this one could have a better chance, with a lower air pressure. I'll keep you posted.

thanks for the tip and looking forward to see your print at 0.1mm !

dremel.JPG (13.02 KiB) Viewed 408 times

[dognotdog]

Just FYI, I also got some Arnitel and normal PLA from Guillaume last week, and they both ship on these new spools that have a 2" hole instead of 1 1/4" like the previous spools.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to try out the Arnitel, yet, being busy with non-3D printing work.

[rad]

well I don't have the dremel 8200-2/45 set
but the 8200-1/35 set:

http://www.dremeleurope.com/gb/en/ocs/p ... C2%AE-8200

From there I used the green 932 Aluminum Oxide Grinding Stone 9,5 mm (932) for the raw work and
the yellow 404 Bristle Brush 13,0 mm (404) for the finish.
The 404 seems ideal for the finish for Arnitel. I just tried it again.

For the normal PLA I used the green 83322 Silicon Carbide Grinding Stone 3,2 mm (83322) and only this one so far. I think that's a very good tool for this works.

I have not so much experience with this tools just bought it lately when I figured that working on a PLA print without any electro-tool isn't going that well.

So I say just try it out like I do and find out what works best for you.

If anyone has experince for good tool to work on the prints let us know.

The highquality prints will take some time. I want to print my figure that took me 4 days to print before.
2 days working up the mesh that you can print it and then 2 days because my extruder started to become painful trouble.

-> 2 Destroyed extruder tempsensors and altime jamming and cloging. It was when I started with the normal PLA white plastic. Didn't expect it to be that different from the other colors but it is. It is a lot more troublesome. So you may understand why I am so happy with the white Arnitel. All that problems solved at once.

[rad]

Very bad day.

Arnitel is troublesome to print at high quality. The same sphere/Ball I printed troublefree I can not print with 0.1mm with arnitel.

It took me a time to figure out where the problem is.
What's happening is that as soon as the layer is in turn that is just above any support the border starts kipping inward and upward. Then the outer border of the next layer misses any lover layer.
Not quite sure if the Arnitel is shrinking or how this is caused. I tried different fills even almost no fill..but always the same picture.

The only thing that worked was to enlarge the support (there is a config parameter ...for angle more flatter than..something likethat I set it from 50 to 35deg)

Now I have the Ball printed at 0.1mm but still it shows that arnitel at 0.1mm layer is a trouble with overhung parts without supports.
The non overhung surface came out very great..and even with no bumbs. (with 0.15mm I still had bumps)

Forgive me if I dont post a picture. It's because I am in a very bad mood. After all those spheres I wanted to print my figure over night and of course the non imaginable happened: The extruder clogged in the run...with Arnitel...arrrghhhhh!!!

And then my extruder clog and jamming nightmare known from the normal white PLA started all over again the whole day.
Run..jamming in the hot end and... extruder dissasemble..Run..jamming ... dissasemble.

(Arnitel jamming is bad because the extruder keeps pushing and the filament gives in between the extruder cold end and the pushing wheel hardly to free without at least takeing the extruder out of the frame)

Since this was with my old extruder I simple replaced it with a brand new one. (I have 2 new ones)

The start was convincing. The extrude looked better but that new extruder ended up with exactly the same hot end jamming and even layers before my old extruder gave up.

Knowing from the normal PLA that I could fix the jamming within the run by reducing the retracting distance from 1.5mm to 0.5mm I reduced my one that I had increased to 0.9 back to 0.4mm.

BUT..It didnt help.
I then tried a 0mm reduction run..jamming in aproximately the same layers..
And a 1.6mm reduction run.. jamming in same layers

So no matter what retraction distance I can not produce that human-figure with Arnitel and 0.1mm layer. (it was also not workign at 0.15mm). And it Jams reproducible in almost the same layer. (+/- 2layer)

It's the same figure that I printed with the normal white PLA before. With the 0.4mm or 0.5mm retraction distance I could print a 0.2mm layer model and a 0.1mm layer one in complete..so this should be printer possible.
(the 0.1mm came out a bit bad..my extruder tempsensor started to measure unreal temperatures)

Seems to me my testing with the sphere was just a too simple model.
With a more complex one Arnitel is causing big extruder jamming troubles. (for sure for 0.1mm and 0.15mm layer)

The worst is.. I have no clue how this jamming in the extruder is happening. The temperature I used was 220 deg.. and the print till to the jam looks perfect and speaks all for a constant and stady 220 deg. But also with 0 mm retraction (I controlled it. It never did retract) it jammed.

Demotivating.

I am out of ideas.

[dognotdog]

Is your extruder fan wired to 5V or 12V? With my dual extruder setup, I had to rewire the fan to 12V, otherwise I would get constant jams with dual printing, I think due to the material sitting in the extruder too long while waiting for the other extruder to finish printing.

[rad]

I don't know about the fan. It's wired like in the manual. I guess 5V.

Too my understanding the Jamming happens in the upper part of the hotend.

I am about to modify the hotend of my old extruder. Actually I already did to analyse what the problem is and I believe to understand it.

If I am correct then I should be able to modify mine that it will not jam anymore.

We will see.

P.S. It will take a few days. I have to wait on material for the modification.
P.S.2 And yes a bit more cooling with 12V might just help to pass the critical part. If my mod isn't successful I will try that. Thank you for the hint. I doubt however that its a full solution for the jamming problematic.