E3D V6 Nozzle Socks
I recently bought a 3 pack of silicon nozzle socks for my Prusa Mk3 and have so far really liked the one that I installed! A guy on reddit mentioned them as being useful to protect against the blob. I'll admit that's certainly a good use for them, but I've found that they do one surprising nice thing for me on every print: make my wipe more effective.
When the nozzle is heating up before a print, there's always some amount of material leakage due to the physics of holding a viscous fluid in a container with a hole in the bottom (aka the nozzle). When the printer goes through its bed self-leveling process, that's even more time for more leakage to occur, so by the time the printer gets to the start of the print, I might have a few cm of filament dangling from the bottom of my nozzle.
On my old .4 mm nozzle, that line of filament tended to be just that, a line. My .25 mm nozzle likes to curl the filament, though. I know what you're thinking: partial nozzle blockage. While I can't 100% dismiss that possibility, I can say that I've seen my share of nozzle clogs, both partial and complete. I've seen this nozzle with a partial clog and it's very distinctive (the extruded filament spirals and gains a "rough" texture). I think that the tendency of the filament to lift back upwards is, at least in part, just because the strand of filament is so thin that it's unduly affected by the radiant heat from the nozzle.
Enter the nozzle sock. It's a silicon sleeve that fits over the hot end with a tiny little hole for the tip of the nozzle to protrude. That silicon is a great insulator and so it cuts down on that radiant heat (although it doesn't eliminate it entirely, obviously). It doesn't even eliminate the tendency of my dangling thin filament leakage to curl upwards... but what it does do is cover up most of the surface area that it could possibly stick to.
When the printer does the wipe before starting the print, the leakage tangle used to get pushed upwards onto the hot end, where it would melt and stick... for an unpredictable amount of time. Now, that tangle gets pushed upwards against the insulating silicon, where nothing exciting happens at all.
And, in this case, nothing exciting is exactly what I'm looking for. The tangle gets knocked loose from the nozzle in the first couple of millimeters of the nozzle wipe, meaning that I no longer need to worry about that rogue plastic snagging part of my first layer and pulling it loose or dropping off in the middle of the some layer leaving a random excess of plastic. All in all, it's been a trivial upgrade to install, but has actually made a nice improvement to the start of my prints!
When the nozzle is heating up before a print, there's always some amount of material leakage due to the physics of holding a viscous fluid in a container with a hole in the bottom (aka the nozzle). When the printer goes through its bed self-leveling process, that's even more time for more leakage to occur, so by the time the printer gets to the start of the print, I might have a few cm of filament dangling from the bottom of my nozzle.
On my old .4 mm nozzle, that line of filament tended to be just that, a line. My .25 mm nozzle likes to curl the filament, though. I know what you're thinking: partial nozzle blockage. While I can't 100% dismiss that possibility, I can say that I've seen my share of nozzle clogs, both partial and complete. I've seen this nozzle with a partial clog and it's very distinctive (the extruded filament spirals and gains a "rough" texture). I think that the tendency of the filament to lift back upwards is, at least in part, just because the strand of filament is so thin that it's unduly affected by the radiant heat from the nozzle.
Enter the nozzle sock. It's a silicon sleeve that fits over the hot end with a tiny little hole for the tip of the nozzle to protrude. That silicon is a great insulator and so it cuts down on that radiant heat (although it doesn't eliminate it entirely, obviously). It doesn't even eliminate the tendency of my dangling thin filament leakage to curl upwards... but what it does do is cover up most of the surface area that it could possibly stick to.
When the printer does the wipe before starting the print, the leakage tangle used to get pushed upwards onto the hot end, where it would melt and stick... for an unpredictable amount of time. Now, that tangle gets pushed upwards against the insulating silicon, where nothing exciting happens at all.
And, in this case, nothing exciting is exactly what I'm looking for. The tangle gets knocked loose from the nozzle in the first couple of millimeters of the nozzle wipe, meaning that I no longer need to worry about that rogue plastic snagging part of my first layer and pulling it loose or dropping off in the middle of the some layer leaving a random excess of plastic. All in all, it's been a trivial upgrade to install, but has actually made a nice improvement to the start of my prints!
Comments
Post a Comment