Why clean and repair the hotend?

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Sometimes your printed pieces do not have the quality and finish that you were looking for? And also, ever, when printing with Filaflex, does your printer’s filament extrusion flow come out poor or intermittent?

If so, it could be due to a partial blockage in the extruder nozzle of your printer due to sediment remains from other filaments. And the good news, a problem that we can avoid and correct quickly and easily!

To solve it, we will have to proceed with its repair and cleaning. It is a process that we recommend to be carried out from time to time as a necessary maintenance task to achieve an optimal extrusion flow in our prints.

Find out why it is important to maintain and repair the hotend of your 3D printer and the steps you must follow to be able to do it quickly and easily.

Symptoms that lead us to think that our hotend is partially blocked

We can think that our hotend is partially blocked when we can see the following symptoms in our printed parts:

  • Inconsistency in layers throughout the piece
  • Stuffed with ‘bald spots’
  • Inconsistent perimeters

How can we solve it?

We can solve it by cleaning the hotend of our printer. Next we will see what elements we need and what steps we must follow.

  • 1 bit 0.4 mm
  • 1bottle of WD-40 lubricant
  • 1 meter approx. rigid filament (PETG or PLA) of 1.75 mm
  • 1small cuticle and nail pliers

10 steps to follow

  1. Raise the Z head and heat the nozzle to 140ºC
  2. Extract the filament from the extruder and the hotend
  3. Remove the charred material from the head with the pliers
  4. Remove the Teflon tube from inside the hotend
  5. Cut the damaged section from the end of the Teflon tube
  6. Spray lightly with WD-40 inside the hotend
  7. Reinsert the Teflon tube
  8. Clean the nozzle with the 0.4 mm bit very delicately and without breaking inside
  9. Heat the hotend to 235ºC
  10. Put the filament back in and print!

Before and after

Below we can appreciate the difference in the finish of the same printed piece without cleaning the hotend (on the left) and once cleaned (on the right).

With a simple maintenance of your hotend you will see how you manage to improve the results of your impressions in order to get the most out of your 3D printer! And if you want more information, don’t miss the following video-tutorial!

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