About to pull the trigger on an Ender 3 and need to buy my first consumables.  I know very little, except PLA is good, PLA+ is better, and Nylon is betterer.

I found Taulman Nylon 230 at what seems to be a good price, and it says it prints at 230 degrees.  Max temp on the Ender 3 is 255, so supposedly that gives me a little headroom before I need to worry about upgrading the hotend?  Or should I plan on upgrading the hotend before looking at any sort of Nylon?

Also, is this Nylon 230 as picky about being kept dry and printed in an enclosure as other forms of Nylon?

If it's your first printer, I would stick with the basics, then go with the more exotic materials as you need.  What are you looking to print?

Start with PLA or PLA+, then work up to PETG and/or Nylon.  I'm not sure about that specific type of nylon, but I would guess it needs to be treated similar to other nylons.

I've been plenty happy with PLA/PLA+/PETG, and have not gotten the bug to go ABS or Nylon (yet? )

Definitely upgrade the hot end before doing anything with nylon, and probably your extruder, too.

While the Ender 3 hot end may be able to reach 255, it’s not a thing you want to do, because the stuff in your Bowden tube will start degrading at lower temperatures, and breathing PTFE off-gassing byproducts is a bad idea to do on a regular basis. And, I mean, beyond the breathing issues- if you melt your Bowden tube you’re not going to get much filament to the nozzle anyway.

Good news is, you can get a decent all-metal hot end for not a ton of money, and you can print a lot of the stuff you’d need to go to a direct-drive extruded setup as well.

All that said, you really don’t want to just jump right in to printing with anything other than generic PLA to start off. Get to where you can do that well first, then move up to more advanced polymers.

So, what exactly do you intend to do with your printer and what led you to choose nylon for that job specifically? It's an interesting material that, as others have pointed out, is rather tricky to print. You even appear to have done some homework to understand that a stock Ender 3 is not optimal for printing nylon.

If your plan doesn't absolutely require nylon, I'd avoid it while starting out. Nylon may be betterer for your purpose. But it will be a bigger pain to print than PLA or PETG.

Edit: To actually address your concern about the hot-end. If you intend to do any volume of nylon printing, you're going to want an all metal hot-end to manage the temperature better. I use a Microswiss hot-end and haven't had any problems. As an earlier poster pointed out, this is to manage degredation of the PTFE tubing. The fumes from this can be bad for you and, even worse, it may cause clogs that ruin your print!

Also, if I was printing nylon or other exotic filaments frequently, a direct-drive extruder would be worth considering as well.

I ran Taulman Nylon 230 on my Ender 3 before any hotend/firmware upgrades. It can be done, bit you'll be pushing the limitations. You'll likely need to run 235 or 240 to get OK layer adhesion. Even then, the layer adhesion wasn't great. I didn't use an enclosure.

It's junk for anything thin walled as it is too soft/flexible. It's ok for thick/heavy walled stuff.

I never found anything that it was well suited to, that PLA or PETG wasn't better for or easier to print.

I did print one of Rat_Patrol's Covid masks with it, as it was the most flexible material I had on hand. It was decent for that job.



ETA. Everything mentioned by the folks above about burning up your bowden tube and it's toxic fumes, as well as any nylon needing to be kept super dry are all very true and should not be overlooked.

Thanks everyone, I'll start off with plain old PLA and move up once I've made the appropriate upgrades.

I can’t recall for certain, but I believe this is the material recommended for printing AR magazines. PLA/PETG are too brittle, and there’s something else about ABS that made it unsuitable as well.

I'd start with eSun PLA+ and learn to print making Ender upgrades.
Then try Fusion Filaments HTPLA+ which is a little harder to work with but very durable and flexible unlike the brittle eSun.

Upgrades I recommend is a Dual Gear Extruder and Capricorn tubing.
Also get some spare print surfaces and a Glass panel.  (Not the Creatively one)
If you want an all metal hot end look into the Gulfcoast Robotics one, clone of the Micro $wiss.

Also if you want quiet printing you NEED this before the steppermotor noise drives you nuts:
BIGTREETECH Direct SKR Mini E3 V2.0 Control Board


TYCOM

+1 for all of this, with the minor quibble that I don't have anything against the Creality glass panel.

Well. One other minor quibble- the noise level of the SKR board is nice, but it's really a fringe benefit: the noise level indicates smoother motion of your stepper motors, and that will give you higher quality prints. The board also lets you run autoleveling and thermal runaway protection at the same time, rather than having to pick one or the other. I personally wouldn't enjoy giving up either one.

Loads of good information here, thanks!  eSun PLA+ is already inbound... as is a Hi Point C9 parts kit for one of my first projects

So a slight detour, I could use your opinions.  Got my Ender 3 yesterday, and I'm assembling now.  The directions say to mount the spool holder on top, but it'll be going on a shelf with low vertical clearance.

The only other workable option I have with the stock bracket is to mount it above the power supply like this... but do you all think that the hot power supply exhaust would be bad for the filament?  Or should I just find a new bracket on thingiverse?

Attached File

I'd be interested to see that. I printed something about 1.250" diameter with a .1875" wall and I could compress it by hand and collapse the wall in .250" easily.
70% infill if I recall.

ditto

I can't see the filament being happy having to curve around.

what you could do is temporarily set it someplace else and go on thingiverse and print a side mount for the spool holder. then move the printer into the original space if you have the clearance on the left side

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm about to do.  There's a dozen of those side mounts sitting there waiting on thingiverse.  That'll be my first project, after the obligatory test print boat thing.

Filament Friday's side spool mount and another small test print were successful.  No spaghetti factory, head crashes, etc.

Soon...

Attached File

Oh I see what you are doing.