Sure, but on these fully DC printers all the power control hardware is integrated into the main board and supplied from a single main power rail. You’d have to basically build a separate power control board with that would allow you to isolate those MOSFET’s on their own power rail and then jump the PWM control signal over to it from the main board. Decent amount of electronics knowledge and skill required to pull that off.

Layer adhesion almost always means plastic is extruding too cold. Especially if the adhesion problems are happening on layers off the build plate. Keep bumping the temp and maybe use less part cooling fan- you can’t really make it worse at this point.

Hardened steel nozzles do not conduct heat nearly as well as typical brass nozzles. (The thermal conductivity of steel is around 40w/m-K for high alloys, while for brass it is 110w/m-K). It cannot heat the plastic up nearly as fast.

I usually start at 210C for PLA on my Prusa mk3’s with a brass nozzle, and will back down to 200/205 if there’s more overhangs or too much stringing. But on the printer set up with a steel nozzle I ended up around 225C to get results comparable to 210 on the brass nozzle.

SLA is nice and you can make intricate figurines but it’s usefulness is limited. resin is also expensive, and a pain to manage and clean up.

if it’s your first foray into printing definitely stick with a “normal” filament plastic machine (FDM). you can do a lot more large-form stuff and also make significant inroads into making mechanical/functional parts that could solve problems around your house even. SLA can’t do that. Plus when FDM fucks up bigly it can usually be fix with a screwdriver and 2 sizes of allen key…

That would be difficult because you would need to somehow separate the power control MOSFET’s from the driver boards so that the controller can still feed them a PWM signal for temp control, but the power would be provided from a separate dedicated usbPD driver board for each set of MOSFETs. At that point it’s really not worth the effort.

Ender3’s have a 360W rater power supply, necessary for the hot bed and hot end current. A little bit of forum googling says they often use up to 250w.

USB PD supports up to a max of 240w, and even then only in a very specific 48 volt supply mode. So you might get away with it, buts it’s gonna be sketchy, and require more stepping down of the 48v usbPD voltage, and complexity, and cost.

definitely one of those “wow the writers did a LOT of coke this weekend” scripts

but yknow it was the 80’s so I don’t exactly blame them

You forgot

• have a weird little pokey spine sticking out the back of their neck

Yup, seems the most likely problem. Bowden tubes are a pain… good luck!

What kind of plastic?

When it reaches that far back corner it looks like your Bowden tube is getting close to being pinched. It’s probably too sharp of an angle leading to too much resistance for your filament and drive motor, that’s what causes the underextrusion. Bit of a design flaw tbh.

Double check your drive teeth tension it might be slipping excessively when the Bowden tube gets to that extreme angle and push resistance gets too high. Also consider trying to reposition the tube so it doesn’t experience such angles.

Yeah z hop should really be close to off unless you have a really really narrow print profile.

Glad to help, and good luck! This is only the first step into becoming a master print tuner.

Hell yeah I do. I help run the makerspace at my college. I’ve fixed damn near every problem a Prusa can have at this point lol

Often a combination of temp too high, not enough retraction, or water contaminated filament.

If the plastic in the hot end is too hot it will keep “running” out of the nozzle after retraction and you’ll get strings. Similarly if you don’t retract enough to actually pull plastic out of the nozzle during a rapid move, it will want to keep pushing thru. This is supported by the little blobs it leaves on that angled surface corner its travelling to when stringing, thats excess material squeezing out during its rapid moves then being left on that wall.
And if there’s water in your filament all bets are off on how it’ll behave.

215 is pretty warm for that esun PLA especially if you’re using the stock brass nozzle, try bumping that down to 205 or even 200, and increase your retraction speed and distance settings in prusaslicer a tiny amount (0.1mm distance, 2mm/s speed at a time until you see improvement is plenty)

Use a temperature calibration tower to test things out.

Oh I couldn’t even see that tooth at first. I just saw the varying layer width.

That’s definitely going to be a slicer or model error. Make sure your input STL doesn’t have any missing faces or geometry and that the teeth were generated correctly

Looks like that’s a bed leveling problem. You can change the z height all you want but if the bed isn’t level to your Z axis, one side will always be too shallow and one side tooDutch? If it gets too close the nozzle it’ll put out almost no plastic which I think is what youre seeing.

Make sure you change the specified nozzle size in the printer’s settings (not just slicer settings). That matters for the stepper scaling.

Consider you are now extruding a larger volume of filament through a larger nozzle. The reduced amount neckdown from filament size, and larger volume of plastic to cool, means you also need to now print at a LOWER temperature than you would with a 0.4 nozzle, else the plastic will be too liquid and want to run out of the nozzle faster than the filament is pushing it. You also now have more plastic mass pushing against the surface tension, and the increase mass can also not solidify on the part surface fast enough and want to droop over the edge. Back it down to 230c, or even as low as 220c, as well as increase your part fan max speed. See if that improves things.

Model in a non threaded portion of your male “screw” with a diameter a bit smaller than your minor thread diameter, and the width of your “nut” female thread section. Print it vertical and put the nut over that non-threaded section so they don’t interfere. If you do it this way you can get singinifcantly better backlash/tolerances than printing a thread on top of another thread, where the threads might try to merge when printing.

Yep. 95A can be printed fast which is why it’s probably called a “high speed TPU”.

Neptune 3 is direct drive so you should be fine for ninjaflex. It’ll take some tuning though because every printer reacts differently to it. Good luck!

Some ideas that work good in tpu:

• a tool or pencil holder with little clips that your tools set into- tpu flexibility makes this great
• a compliant phone stand that clips around your phone
• an open honeycomb stress ball fidget… thing (I dunno just spit balling here lol)

What’s the shore hardness on that TPU? Not every TPU is the same.

Most generic printer TPU’s are around 90 to 95A shore hardness, which ensures extruder compatibility. It’s “flexible” but very stiff. It’s best for stuff like compliant structural parts that need to be shock absorbent but still strong.

Stuff like ninjaflex gets down around 40A iirc, which is considerably more rubber-like. However, Compatibility depends on your printer. Ninjaflex is OK in direct drive extruders with the right feed teeth, but pretty tough to get good results out of if you have a Bowden extruder because it will want to bunch up and compress inside the feed tube.

You also have to minimize infill and wall thickness when slicing to get the most flexibility.

Yeah, it’s hard to find mechanical ones that can increment by ten, and I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen one that can increment down as well as up.

If you do all scores by ten you can cheat and draw an extra zero to the right of the dial number lol. But if it’s scores like 1, 2, 5, 10… its tricky.