waste / nozzle priming bucket - material for lip?
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I'm thinking of adding a small "waste bucket" to my printer so that I can have it extrude some material before printing and wipe the nozzle afterwards. At the moment, the extruded material just drops onto the build plate.
Making the bucket is not a huge issue, but for the lip to wipe the nozzle on I would need some flexible heat-resistant material - some silicone like the "socks" the E3D V6 comes with perhaps. Does anyone have a recommendation on what material to use and where to get it? -
piece of brass? thin enough
brass brush?
I plan to do the same and will use brass brush that is used for guns/rifles cleaning -
I make the Silicone socks myself, so there is a 2 compound mixing Silicone, that is heat resistent.
https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.de%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F153224952657
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I just print two outlines around the part to prime and make sure level looks good for every print. The brush idea could be useful for petg and tpu because I find they make a mess of the nozzle. A brass brush with some kind of servo to move it out of the way when not cleaning would be what I may do one day.
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@bret4 Yeah, I love PETG and hate the mess around nozzle
That's why thought about brush -
Hi,
something that Stratasys FDM printers do which works very well is the combination of a fine brass brush and rather stiff (orange) silicone lip. These come as a set in one piece with each set of nozzles and thus can be swapped after some 100 machine hours. They are clipped into the frame to align with the waste bucket. The nozzle is brushed off first in a swift back-and-forth Motion, then wiped off with the lip.
I would opt for rather hard material for your silicone lip. I don't see the material from e3d's socks lasting very long in this application…
best regards, Niklas
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@bret4 I do print a brim as well. With my old (non-Duet) Cartesian printer, any ooze that occurred was simply dropped off the edge of the print bed because the nozzle home position was to the left and front of the print surface. With my new Duet-driven Delta, the home position is right above the print bed of course, so all the "droppings" from heating the nozzle or changing the filament land on the print bed and - with my usual bad luck - end up in the printed piece.
So far, I haven't tried anything but PLA yet, but once the enclosure is completed, I will try other stuff as well. I should have enough -
@briskspirit Do you know how the E3D silicone "sock" would handle being dragged across a metal brush? I don't - I could image it might be damaged or even pulled off partially or completely...
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@vwegert I cut that sock to free whole nozzle as it got ripped after 3-4 prints ...
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I have a Cubex Duo that came with a waste bucket. It had a spring loaded teflon strip that the nozzle would scrape against to knock the drool off the extruder. The teflon strip worked fine even at ABS print temperatures because it was only in contact with the nozzle for a fraction of a second as the nozzle passed over it.
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@mrehorstdmd good idea!
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I have seen some printers use soda cans that were cut into strips as a wipe area.
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@chanders Hmmmm... Makes me want to check whether I could fit the lower half of a soda can into my printer...
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@vwegert This is exactly what I do. I use a strip of silicon rubber which is pressed into a slot in a long "bucket". My purge commands consist of extruding some filament then wiping the nozzle back and forth across this strip. I'm 10,000 miles away from home at the moment and only have my phone with me so it's not easy to post a link. However, take a look at my blog which is linked in my signature. There is a detailed post describing how I print with a purge bucket. HTH
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@deckingman This looks like what I had in mind originally. Do you happen to remember what kind of silicone strip you used?
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@vwegert Not off hand. I think I just did a "Google search" for silicon rubber strip or some such term.
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@deckingman You could probably get a silicone strip from a squeegee...
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I used a bit of silicone sock from e3d. It worked nice...
Silicon and heat resistance... -
@mrehorstdmd said in waste / nozzle priming bucket - material for lip?:
@deckingman You could probably get a silicone strip from a squeegee...
Yes that would have worked too. I found some strip about 20mm X 3mm but IIRC had to buy a I metre length.
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I found that the wire bush destroyed a brass nozzle pretty quickly. I ended up using a silicone strip as others have mentioned. I get the silicon from McMaster-Carr and then cut it to size.
