.25 vs .35 vs .5 mm nozzles

[jereywolf]

I have only ever used the .35mm nozzle. What are the advantages to others? How has your experience been with these?

[jsc]

Thicker nozzles print faster, but you lose resolution in the plane.

If you're printing large bulky objects, you could use a .50 nozzle to speed them up. If you're doing intricately detailed miniatures, a smaller nozzle would be better.

[jereywolf]

Cool! So do you adjust your printing speed parameter to accommodate each nozzle diameter? Do you know any general guidelines for that? Or other resources?

[Tim]

Also the MakerGear site warns against the 0.25 nozzle as having a considerably greater tendency to clog, so I guess you'd want to be fairly comfortable with disassembling and reassembling the hot ends if you're going to use the 0.25.

[jereywolf]

Well, I definitely don't want that. lol I make a lot of large parts for assemblies. So I'm thinking that I could save some time by using the Ø.50mm nozzle. I sand the lines out of some of my larger assemblies anyhow.

[jsc]

Cool! So do you adjust your printing speed parameter to accommodate each nozzle diameter? Do you know any general guidelines for that? Or other resources?

It's not so much that you adjust the printing times for the nozzle, it's just inherently faster because the wider nozzle is laying down more plastic at once. You can see for yourself the difference in what you can expect by doing two slices, one at your current nozzle settings, and again with your nozzle size set to 0.5 (and the filament width set to something reasonable, like 0.6). Then check the estimated print times.

There is also another consideration based on the maximum recommended layer height for different nozzle widths (see http://reprap.org/wiki/Calibration#Layer_height for a discussion). With a 0.5 nozzle, you can go up to 0.4mm layer heights vs. a recommended maximum of 0.28mm for a 0.35mm nozzle. If you are printing at 0.2mm normally, this will halve your print times with no change in print speeds.