Problems with 0.5mm extruder nozzle

[majerdave]

I recently purchased a 0.5mm nozzle for quicker prints but have run into trouble. My M2 came with the standard 0.35mm nozzle.

I have not seen any significant changes to my "estimated" print times. I only seem to get a small improvement in speed even though the 0.5mm nozzle is about 50% larger in cross section compared to the 0.35mm nozzle.

Maybe I did not change the settings correctly? The nozzle did not come with any instructions.

In Simplify3D, I went to the process (FFF) settings>Primary extruder toolhead
I just switched the setting the "nozzle diameter" from 0.35mm to 0.5mm, and
"extruder width" changed from "manual" 0.35mm to 0.5mm

My print quantity has also suffered since changing.

I hope someone can help.

[Jules]

Definitely no expert, but one of the things that the guys here have been saying is that your extruded thread width needs to be a bit wider than the opening of the nozzle. (Smooshes it and makes it stick to the next thread better.) But it needs to be less than the OD of the nozzle, so don't go too high. (Can't tell you what that is, you'd need to measure it.)

So maybe if you changed the value to manual 0.6 mm you might see better results. Likely need to reset the Z-stop and recalibrate the extrusion too. There's a great tutorial in the How-to Guides section.

And hopefully someone will come along in a bit who knows what they are doing.

[jimc]

did you change the layer height? the extrusion width saves minimal time. a .5 nozzle can print at higher layers. bump the layer height up to .3 - .35. your extrusion width should be around .6 or a little bigger.

[benavery]

Also, remember there is a default setting that says don't print any layer faster than 15s or so (On the cooling tab). So for small parts S3D is going to slow down the movement to keep total time over 15anyways. Doubling the layer height should always half the print time though, and is doing so will be your biggest win.

[ednisley]

I have not seen any significant changes to my "estimated" print times.

A 0.50 mm nozzle can extrude twice the plastic per millimeter of filament motion as a 0.35 mm nozzle. However, changing the thread width from 0.35 mm to 0.50 mm increases the cross-section area by only 40%, so the slicer can't take advantage of the increased flow rate. Because the volume of plastic increases by 40% at the same XY speed, the slicer must reduce the filament speed to lay down the proper amount of plastic.

Set the extrusion width to 0.60 mm and increase the printing speed by 20%, which will extrude about twice the volume of plastic per second at the same layer thickness.

Alternatively, set the extrusion width to 0.60 mm width and increase the thread thickness by 20%. That increases the cross-section area by a factor of two at the same XY speed, so the volume per second doubles.

You should then recalibrate the Extrusion Multiplier value to make the actual thread width match the slicer setting.

The total time to print a model won't go down by a factor of two, even though the extruder squirts out twice the amount of plastic per second, because of all the acceleration / deceleration / non-printing travel time.

The visible resolution of the models will get worse, however, because the larger nozzle can't reproduce small details as well, but after you get all the new settings adjusted correctly, the result should look reasonably good.

[majerdave]

Thanks for all the FAST and great feedback.

The thread thickness change really sped things up!

Quality was slightly improved by the calibration and adjusting the z-stop. But I guess this is the trad-off that needs to be made for the faster prints.