i work in an industrial field and have a small farm of 10 X1C, 2 P1S and X1E.
right now im printing a pretty large order of 150 housings which take about 5h per part. since i started mass producing them on all of the X1C and the X1E (i dont take P1S since their print results are not good enough for this case) i had a lot of trouble with heat creep resulting in blocked/gunked extruder units and blocked nozzles. this takes quite a while to fix when you come to office in the morning and 4/10 printers didnt finish their jobs due to blocked extruders.
first thing i noticed was that it primarly happened on the X1C where the AMS stands on top (on some printers it stands aside) so i took all AMS down. Second thing i did was reduce the bed temperature from 90C to 80C and tested bed adhesion (still works). Furthermore i decreased the hotend temp from 260 to 250.
However despite those efforts i still have gunked extruders.
To me it seems like there is too much heat in the build chamber. Unfortunately this room has no cooling, so room temperatures might go up to 28C which seems to be the equilibrium when all printers are running.
Filament is Formfutura Apollo X
Does anyone have an idea what to do? Thanks forehand // Marcus
Hey man. Same here. I bought 2 x1c for a project, for spare parts printed in petg and tpu. Basically…tpu is impossible. No ams as suggested, generic tpu but with same specs as bambu tpu 95A, clogs. Heat creep. Tried everything… No roof, dolor Open, aloe printing, cold printing, fast printing (as fast as tpu allows)… Nothing. So i printed thise parts on an artillery X2. Petg goes amazing. But i had to use that x1c to print other things, and i mainly print gears on PA6. So i tried… heatcreep. It starts well…but end up clogging. And PA needs a closed chamber and at least 50degrees. So it shouldnt experience heatcreep… I have another self built machine with active chamber heating to 70degrees celsius and the same filament works perfect. So i Guess they heatsink and its cooler are way too small to evacuate the heat.
I am not a professional and don’t have print farm experience.
My suggestion stands on how it looks from your description.
I would try reducing the hot end temperature to 240ºC. You mention the excess heat and thus higher ambient temperature, which will reduce the temperature difference and so the heat transfer. At 240ºC, you are still in the recommended printing temperature range. Is there any reason for starting printing at 260ºC?
Five hours of print seems to be a large volume, so I would expect that you benefit from the higher temperature within the chamber.
I personally do 5+ hour ASA prints on a P1S and in the afternoon the area where the printer is at can get up to 30°C and to date have not seen heat creep issues with the ASA I use (Flashforge). FYI Chamber temps measured with a non calibrated probe that I installed seem to level out around 50-55°C.
I do not have experience with the ApolloX filament but reading on their website it does seem to be a blended polymer to improve some characteristic like warping and flow and although they indicate a viscat softening temp of 98°C on their MDS it might be a little more sensitive to heat creep.
Maybe try to open the top lid just a crack open to reduce the chamber temp a bit.
Another thing to look at is the filament retraction setting as this can create increased heat creep if too frequent and/or with long retract travel.
The temperature equilibrium was at around 50°C in the chamber, which caused the issues. i tried loosening the tension-bolt in the extruder which pushes the feeder-wheels together so the filament will not get deformed that easily. Other than that, i removed the top lid (which completely solved the whole problem - fortunately warping was not an issue). Only downside is the emission of the ASA (we have a pretty large air filter and all printers are in a separate room so i hope this is not too bad).
For the future, i will change to a different ASA which may not cause those problems.
Well, an update: i had a system with a thermistor and a screen, to read temperatures. I figured out a way to puto the thermistor through the fins of the heatsink, and started heating only the nozzle, up to 240C. After 10 minutes, the heatsink didnt go past 54C, so that wasnt the problem. Then, i heat up the bed, up to 110C. And started printing. The print was good until temp in the heatsink reached up to 85C, where it failed and heatcreep happened. So, i lowered the bed temperature to 80, and then 90, where it found an equilibirum point, to be able to print complete parts…but they fail by delamination. The chamber temperature, that didnt go past 45C (while with a bed at 110C goes up to 52C) is not enough to create a good environment for larger prints. So i invented a active chamber heating system, to go to 60C, but i need to make som tests, because it will for sure send the heatsink to heatcreep.
Im going to try that, and after that, create a block with the size of the heatsink cooler, and make a watercooling system, trying to minimize changes to stock.
