OK, so I have a gripe about this nozzle. I have been using it for about 6 months. It states that it has a non-stick coating applied to it but PETG seems to stick to it like glue. As a result, a failed print due to the initial purge not being cleared, caused a large blob on the end and bent the hotend. I was able to bend it back and use it again, but the amount of PETG that kept getting stuck to it was ridiculous. It threw me back to the days of having to babysit the printer like I did with my old Creality printer. Yet that one did not have a purge issue because it was done manually.
I was using the stock nozzle for a much longer period of time with no issues. I even swapped to the smaller 0.2 mm stock nozzle and there were no failures due to purge sticking to the nozzle.
My other gripe is that no matter what settings I use, it does not save time by selecting high flow vs. standard flow. I even had the profile loaded initially before the xx.9 update and it did nothing for the amount of time to generate a print. Sometimes it was even longer when selecting the high flow setting. Yes, I changed the filament flow rate to the recommended value from E3D and Bambu Lab. I also performed all of the recommended settings from the Bambu site.
So after spending an exorbitant amount of money on a supposedly better nozzle, I am quite frustrated with 1. having spent that much money on a nozzle and 2. spending money on a nozzle that just lasted for barely 6 months.
I’m not sure if anyone else is experiencing such issues, but I thought I would speak about my experience so that others don’t make the same mistake of purchasing it.
Are you using a .6 nozzle with HF settings? A .4 nozzle is not a “true” HF nozzle. Thats why you won’t see any decrease in print times. AA .6 nozzle will allow you to lay down fewer layers, and increase line thickness. To call a .4 a high flow nozzle is a marketing gimmick
In my experience it isn’t just marketing. I can use 0.75 line widths on my P1S with the 0.4 obxidian nozzle without much real decrease in quality, speeding up functional prints quite a bit. I certainly couldn’t do that with the stock nozzle (and I tried). Same is true for the HF nozzles on the H2S.
On max flow rate tests, the high flow nozzles outperform the standard nozzles, of course not as much as the marketing slicks claim.
Now to OPs point, PETG does seem to stick to the E3D Obxidian nozzles I’ve used and it is pretty damn annoying. Been thinking about getting the non-stick goop to coat the nozzle regularly, but haven’t due to laziness. I just run a metal brush over the nozzle occasionally (prob not recommended). As always, YMMV
Yeah, I was cleaning that nozzle so much that it was just ridiculous. I used a silicon brush like the ones on the A1/mini nozzle wiper. It would also destroy the silicon boot when the PETG stuck on there.
As far as using a metal brush, I would not use that on any nozzle, with the exception of super cheap ones like MK8 on Creality machines. Unfortunately for the P1/X1 nozzles, the heat sink is part of it. The amount of times that the E3D needed cleaning would have worn it down so much that it would not be a 0.4 mm nozzle anymore!
Thanks for the idea to use the spray. I will look into that to see if it helps any with the PETG on this particular nozzle.
Like I said before, the stock nozzles seem to have very little sticking when using PETG. I did notice that PLA was not an issue on the E3D.
Using a higher volumetric flow nozzle often do not end up with lower print times due to acceleration limits and minimum layer time. It depends on the geometry of the object but increasing layer height and line width will reduce the print time.
The Phaetus Conch and Phaetus Conch Plus offer far better value for a nozzle upgrade for the X1C and P1S in my opinion. The performance is not as good as the E3D Obxidian but it’s much cheaper and has a neck that is not easily bent. I bought one of each of 0.4 and 0.6 and the nozzles are perfectly straight whereas every Bambu nozzle is just slight bent even when brand new.
Increase max flow on your filament. Turn off slow down in the filament options. Make sure to select high flow. I’m printing 40-45mm^3 flow at 200mm/sec with the cheapest petg you can buy and it works great. And it is 20-30% faster than the regular hotend.
If you push it enough, you can run into the “something is wrong with the hotend” error because it is pushing so much plastic through the hotend that it can’t hold the temperature.
You need to do a lot of tweaking and testing. They don’t tell you that when you buy the hotend.
That is nonsense. HF nozzles have a different internal structure than regular nozzles. Instead of a single tube as melt zone, a HF nozzle splits into usually 3 smaller tubes. That allows for a much larger contact surface between filament and nozzle, so that heat transfer is more efficient, allowing much higher flow rate or lower nozzle temperature at the same flow rate.
The size of the orifice has some influence on maximum possible flow rate but far less than the efficiency of the melt zone. E.g. a 0.4mm HF nozzle reaches far higher flow than a regular 0.6mm nozzle and probably even more than a regular 0.8mm nozzle. The bottleneck is not pushing the molten filament through the orifice but melting it fast enough.
Although a regular 0.8mm nozzle can print faster than a regular 0.4mm nozzle, it only melts the filament correctly at the outside but the core is actually too cold. the larger orifice then allows to still push that partially molten filament through.
So for fast printing, a HF nozzle is the far better solution than a larger nozzle. And it even allows you to keep the high detail on the outer walls.
On topic:
I have also observed some buildup on the nozzle occasionally, but not to an extent that it would harm my prints.
Maybe you can try to recalibrate the flow rate? I could imagine that the HF nozzle needs a little bit less flow than a regular nozzle.
E3D also recommend reducing the temperature by about 10°C compared to regular nozzles due to the different placement of the sensor. I have reduced it by only 5°C and still reach over 40mm³/s with almost all filaments. Maybe that could have an impact too?
Thanks for the option. Yes, I noticed the same with the stock nozzles. They seem to have a very slight angle to them. I thought that was normal. The interesting thing is that I didn’t even realize that the E3D was bent because, even bent, it still generated prints. I decided to clean up the nozzle by taking it off and that is when I noticed the almost 45 deg angle!
I have seen some other hotends that reinforce it with two screws near the heatsink. But with this issue, all of the force used to bend the nozzle would have been transferred to another weak point, which may have caused other damage than just a bent hotend.
With all of these suggestions, I decided to swap in the E3D again.
Lo and behold, the bed leveling failed due to a stuck purge on the nozzle. This is after I completely cleaned off all the residue with a heat gun! Back to babysitting the E3D again.
If what both of you(hgschmie and akrk) are suggesting is crank up the flow to 40-45 mm3, reduce temp by 10 deg C, turn off slow down in the cooling section of the filament settings and make sure high flow is being used (which I always select when using this hotend).
So let me try this and I’ll come back with some results. Thanks!
At least for the stuck purge, you can also try editing the gcode. The steps for the purge are:
Wait nozzle temp to lower 20 degrees
Retract slightly
Shake
Wipe
Wait a bit and wipe again
Normally the purge breaks off at retraction or shake. What you could do is add a longer wait after step 1, since it doesn’t actually wait until the nozzle temp has fully reached the setpoint, or shake more times, or shake more violently by increasing acceleration.
Increased flow to 50 mm3 (wanted to see if this was possible to get a good print).
Lowered nozzle temp settings from stock 230-245 to 220-235
Turned off “slow printing down for better layer cooling” in the cooling section of the filament
I made a print of a small item and it was much faster than prior prints! Changing these three settings made the print time 28m 51s. When I reverted back to the stock filament values using the high flow setting, the time in the slicer showed 52m17s.
The print came out looking better than a previous print I made of the same item. Thank you both for finally clearing up all of my confusion with this nozzle setting. I hope that Bambu Lab will update these settings for their filaments when using the E3D nozzle. It seems that the “high flow” setting does basically nothing but increase speeds slightly which does not lower time for printing very much.
Again, thank you so much for your help! At least I can use this nozzle for what it was intended for - speed!
Now off to generating filament profiles using these settings!
Thanks so much for following through with the settings that worked. I’m considering buying the 0.6mm Obxidian nozzle, but wasn’t sure if it really would make a difference. And I got especially worried reading about the PETG problems, because I mostly use PETG (functional objects, not much in the way of toys or decor).
Did you find these settings also helped it avoid PETG sticking to the nozzle? Or is that still a thing, that maybe should just be considered a standard problem to clean up after?
I really haven’t done anything about the PETG sticking, like performing extra wipes in the gcode as suggested. Still having those issues with the sticking. If you are planning on using it for low filament swaps, then I would recommend it. But if you are doing more than 20-30 filament changes, I wouldn’t recommend because a purge will eventually stick on it. It also depends on the brand of filament.
Of course if you want the extra speed, then I would recommend. I now have two settings for 50 mm^3/s and 45 mm^3/s. I normally run the 45 for all of the PETG - Bambu, Sunlu, Flashforge, Overture.
I think that once Bambu Lab releases their settings for filament using this nozzle, then it will be seamless. But now it still requires some changes to see speed improvements.
I haven’t run the 0.6, so I couldn’t tell you how well this one works. But the coating on the nozzle should be the same.
So, I wanted to see how fast I could print a benchy after you asked about the nozzle. I downloaded the “speed boat race Bambu PLA profile” and I just ran a PETG speed benchy using the setting at 50 mm^3/s and it came out at 14m 20s print time! Total time was 21m29s (setup was 1/3 the print time at 7m 9s). It had issues with the top circular smokestack, but everything else was pretty good for this fast flow rate and lowered temperature.
Well, after updating bambu studio to the latest version, it seems that this method of speeding up the print time does not work anymore. Selecting a higher flow rate does nothing to reduce the time of the print. Not sure what broke between versions.
Yes, it is set up as high flow on both the printer and studio. When I change it from the default PETG HF to my setting for 45 mm3/s, it does nothing to change the print time. The 45 mm3/s setting also has the “Slow printing down for better layer cooling” unselected.
Well, I did a bunch of changes without any headway. It looks like under filament settings there is now a direct drive standard and direct drive high flow selections. When looking at these, there is a change in the max volumetric speed - standard =21, high flow = 29 and also in the flow ratio - standard = 0.95 and high flow = 0.952. The slow printing down for better layer cooling is turned on for both standard and high flow settings for the filament.
The interesting thing is that if I change either the direct drive high flow setting or standard setting –> max volumetric speed to something very large like 70 mm3/s and turn off the slow printing down for better layer cooling, it does not affect the print time. Not sure if the software is reading the max volumetric speed setting after it is applied.
Is it possible, that the process settings have been reverted to default, especially print speeds and line widths?
Then flow rate wouldn’t make a difference, because actual flow is limited by speeds and line widths, not filament max flow.
