No wonder you lost the plot. You started this thread to show us how to make a nice PLA ball and afterwards I entangled it with flexible filament of assorted brands..
I’ll try to stick to the point,. ( meaning : Beware ! long dull post ahead ).
That Smart Flex TPU that I purchased first has been mission impossible for me and my printer. No matter what settings I used ,temperature of nozzle, bed, retractions, cooling idler tensions, etc,
All the prints started normally, but after a while began to underextrude heavily and solid wall became crumbling sponges. I ‘baked’ the spool in the filament drier prior to using it and afterwards it was kept always in a sealed bag with desiccants. I don’t think that humidity was a factor here, because the prints started always OK.
Now, my first try with the eSun TPU-95 was quite good, in the sense that if I had used supports for the bottom probably I wouldn’t have had any issues, Even without supports, the model finished reasonably well and I couldn’t detect the slightest symptom of underextrusion,
So, the never ending problems with the first brand of flexible filament wasn’t a clogged nozzle, filament entangled in the idler gears or wrong temperatures (I tried a wide range ). No, the problem was that specific brand of filament which, for some reason seems to be incompatible with my Prusa printer and it’s not a Bowden system but a direct extruder with double gears.
That doesn’t means that this brand is total crap. Maybe with other printers, like your Enders, it will be OK, although I have serious doubts.
If you want to know my current settings for the eSun TPU-95:
Nozzle: 210ºC, bed: 50ºC. Layer fan disabled for the first 3 layers and set to 90% from the layer 4. Retraction: 0.8mm. retract/detraction speed: 25mm/s
Maximal volumetric speed : 2.5 mm3/s ( for a 0.4mm nozzle that’s 20mm/s max speed )
I read on Amazon people using much higher or lower temperatures (190 to 240ºC) with success and I expect that a hot bed isn’t really necessary with this filament.
For the record, the bed of my Prusa has a removable steel sheet coated with a layer of PEI. Printing with flex filament I apply glue stick to the sheet, not to improve adhesion but as a separation layer to avoid damage to the PEI coating when removing the print. Adhesion to the bed hasn’t been an issue neither with the ‘bad’ filament nor with the eSun.
), it will be fun to make it from rubbery filament. No storm could break it. It would just bounce back and forth.
but it doesn’t pays the hassle most of the time. This stuff doesn’t likes overhangs, bridges, thin walls or a small footprint on the bed. If you wanted to print with flex the ball that started this thread, the base would need to have supports all around almost as high as the radius of the ball, otherwise the print would start wobbling when the nozzle passes over it, as soon as the Z axis reaches a certain height. In top of that, supports are difficult to remove afterwards.
