Printing with TPU on the Ender 3 Pro
I wrote this for my Tiger II page but wanted to add the information to the "All Things 3D Printing" Forum thread as well.
When I first tried this I looked briefly online but couldn't find anything too useful, so I kind'a wung it. I ended up buying TECBEARS TPU from Amozon based mostly on price, good reviews and it being 1.75mm. I'd read online that TPU requires a higher extrusion temperature than PLA so before printing my treads with TPU, I tried upping the extruder temp on my Ender - Don't do that! Instead in Cura set the material selector to TPU.
There are a couple other manufacturers that had TPU as an option (oddly it's not available under Generic), I went with Velleman - because I liked the name. OK, maybe not a great reason but it did produce good results! After the tread design was sliced and saved with the TPU material selected, my Ender 3 Pro automatically heated to the right temps for both bed (40c) and extruder (220c) when the tread design was selected for printing. Only one more tip, don't forget to change your Cura material selection back to PLA before slicing the next object that will use it.
I guess this is an update on printing with TPU.
After switching back to PLA my prints were coming out poorly and failing due to under extrusion. Having just replaced all the feeder components for the same reasonĀ (That's another post I need to write...) I was guessing it was a clogged nozzle due to stickiness I had noticed after printing with the TPU. Long story short I ended up disassembling the extruder, cleaning it all up and replacing the feeder tube. sticky TPU residue was all over the hot end and up the feeder tube a bit. After this was done all worked great again. Don't think I'll be printing one off TPU prints any time soon - I'll batch them up and be prepared to do a tear down afterward.