I am a novize to 3D Prining and I’m making good progress. I tried to print with PLA-TPU of 80 Shore which worked but I wasn’t happy with the result, the product remained stiff. I got me samples of pure flex TPU of 70 and 60 Shore but failed to load the 70 SHora filament as it was too soft. Any experience on how to get these materials to work would be appreciated.
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If you had your problem with the tpu being too soft that you couldn’t get it to grip the knurled wheels of the extruder, I would shorten the PTFE tube, put just a few cm out of the extruder and try to load the filament again… It is not necessary to have the long PTFE tube as supplied, on my printer that I built I have 1cm of PTFE on the hotend also because the bambulab are not bowden extruders but direct extruders so a PTFE so long, especially if you print with very soft filaments… Let me know how it worked 
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Also I think you have to play with the settings in the slicer to correctly incorporate the % of PLA with the TPU to have more softness but I have never tried, I still don’t have such a soft TPU. while for the less soft TPU it worked as it should…
In this hotend I didn’t even use ptfe and the filament is fairly soft generic tpu but I have no problem loading it manually.
Thanks so much for the advice. I will try it out. I was only concerned that if I don’t get it into the extruder, because the extruder won’t grab it, it might not push it out again either.
I will report back! And thanks again.
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Did as it had been recommended, just put an 4 cm piece of PTFE tube into the device and it prints well with the soft TPU (70A). As I’m new to all this I have even softer (60A) samples of TPU but I didn’t try it yet
Anyway many thx for the advice
If you want to print releaible soft materials you should make this change!
I am trying to print some Filaflex TPU 60A with my A1 Mini. It’s so soft (and elastic) that I can’t push the filament into the print head (which is easy if you’re using, let’s say, PLA). What can I do to load this soft stuff?
Cut a few inches of PLA and melt it onto the end of the TPU, then stick it in and extrude the PLA out
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I was facing the same issue but got support from the community. What worked was to stick a few cm of Teflon tubing into the printer and feed the tpu into there. Reduced friction a lot and allowed to print A70 tpu.
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