Ninjaflex on Solidoodle? (Page 1 of 2)

I have some Ninjaflex, but I haven't tried it yet and will be using it with a Bulldog extruder anyway.  Does your printer have the old style acrylic extruder or the new aluminum one?  The biggest problem with flexible filaments is bending and jamming in the space between the gear and the top of the hot end, so the more closely the filament is guided through that area the better.  The acrylic extruder would be better at that since it provides a closed channel all the way to the hot end opening. 

Other than that, most recommendations I have seen are to print slowly, no faster than maybe 30mm/s.  Some say to use no retraction, others say it's ok, but probably keep the retraction speed or distance short to avoid jerking the filament around too much.

I have had some success this weekend with ninjaflex on my solidoodle 2.
The attached photo is the elastic wristband that I just printed.

Nozzle temp: 197
    Anything hotter and I it just oozes out and portions of the print will collapse before it cools.
    Anything colder and the filament eventually buckles as it feeds faster than it can melt.
    I still get some oozing, but the prints look pretty good.

Bed temp: 40
I am using a glass bed.  I am getting good sticking, and the model peels off easily.

I changed all feed rates to 30 mm/s to avoid buckling of the filament.

In Slic3r, I changed enabled Print Settings>>Layers and perimeters>>Advanced>>Avoid crossing perimeters.
   I absolutely needed this with the early higher temperature prints to eliminate oozy threads.
I also enabled perimeters to make sure material was flowing properly when the actual print started.

I am using the lawsey replacement jigsaw extruder feed.

That's really cool. Thanks a lot for the info! I will be trying this in the following days. Do you use hairspray on your glass bed?

I had some success last weekend with ninjaflex.  In order to print at all I had to add a short length OF PTFE tubing between the hot end and the drive gear.  The filament is VERY noodley so the tube has to fill ALL of the space in between.  I am running with my modified mk5 and a jhead knockoff that has a recessed  hex socket so I already had a tube inserted in the recess and just had to extend it.

As others have also mentioned, I still needed to turn down the speed greatly to prevent the filament from jumping out, and it seems to take awhile for the filament to compress enough to start extruding, so I got better result disabling retraction.

Still, some things don't work so well.  The extruded filament seems to want to form globs so partial infill didn't work well for me, and when I tried to print a part that had a narrow cylinder on to, the ninjaflex got dragged around by the extruder resulting in a lumpy post half the diameter I was trying for.

2mm ID PTFE, there's some in the E3D accessories section of my signature.

I have a solid doodle 2 and am trying to do the same thing too with ninga flex. 1st it appears the temp needs to be slite  above 210c-220 t it melts close to 135 -140c the e3d print head is able to raise up that high cause it fins of aluminum and fan keep heat confined to lower hot end . but then electronics of soliddoodle don't like the new parts the the resister of sol. is one way  pos neg sides. resist coil wires any dir. resistor wire coiled. also the thermisister must be dif. vlt. miliamp. anyway i erased firmware rebooted opensource to eeprom now controll is back but i still need to find a driver for hot end to be recognized go figure.

the solid doodle 2 printer board Rev E. or AT90USB  mother board is a TeensyIU/printer board re install firm ware useing USB Sharealike 3.0  mendal ued the same .

if you want to work on   this tweak on the doodle come to my tech shop in Cypress TX. 77429 [email protected]

Shouldn't need mods ; just slow down your print speed... thats the trade off with flexible...

Slow your print and extrusion speed down.. Around 10-15% of normal print speed is typical for flexible

About 10% of whatever you have now.. Or just use the slider in RH set to 10%.

Well.. 20Mm/s.. On extrusion particularly. You just can't print quickly with flex unless it's fully constrained in the extruder. This is the pay off for flexible.

20Mm/s is still more than 10% of stock speed anyway. But you have to go slow to feed reliably.. Its just how it is. If you want quick.. Don't use flex