MakerGear Forum

My pre-owned printer came with an aftermarket extruder, how do I figure out what size the nossle is?

I extruded some plastic manually, collecting it out of the air with a stick, and measured it when it cooled, but the diameter for the strand in the thickest points hovered in between .5mm and .35mm (the two possible sizes my hotend comes in).

If you have a set of calipers, you measure the opening in the nozzle that the filament comes out of. A 0.35 mm nozzle has an opening that is 0.35 mm, a 0.5 mm nozzle has a hole that is 0.5 mm in diameter, etc.

That's probably a 0.35mm nozzle. There's some die swell that'll lead to fatter extrudate than the actual nozzle diameter.

it's written on the size of the nozzle itself quite big unless is covered by hardened plastic

Jules wrote:If you have a set of calipers, you measure the opening in the nozzle that the filament comes out of. A 0.35 mm nozzle has an opening that is 0.35 mm, a 0.5 mm nozzle has a hole that is 0.5 mm in diameter, etc.

Thanks, not sure why this did not occur to me.

insta wrote:That's probably a 0.35mm nozzle. There's some die swell that'll lead to fatter extrudate than the actual nozzle diameter.

Thanks, also glad to know the proper terminology of die swell.

WarMace wrote:

Jules wrote:If you have a set of calipers, you measure the opening in the nozzle that the filament comes out of. A 0.35 mm nozzle has an opening that is 0.35 mm, a 0.5 mm nozzle has a hole that is 0.5 mm in diameter, etc.

Thanks, not sure why this did not occur to me.

It's possible that it might not (still) be a standard nozzle size, which is why i suggested measuring....they might have run a metallic filament through it and ground it out larger.
(We just saw a rather spectacular case of that happen very recently. Wasn't metallic filament, but the nozzle hole did fail in a rather awesome way. )