There’s nothing quite as annoying as loading up a spool of flexible filament, hitting print, and hearing that dreaded grinding noise from your extruder. Flexible filament jams are a common headache, especially for anyone new to printing with materials like TPU, TPE, or soft PLA. The filament buckles, wraps around the drive gear, or gets…
If you’ve ever printed with TPU and pulled your part off the bed only to find it covered in fine, hair-like strings, you know the frustration. TPU stringing is one of the most common issues when working with flexible filaments, and it can turn an otherwise perfect print into a fuzzy mess. The good news?…
Why Your Choice of TPU Brand Actually Matters Walk into any 3D printing forum and ask for the best TPU filament — you’ll get a dozen different answers. That’s because TPU varies wildly between manufacturers. One brand’s “TPU” prints like a dream while another turns into spaghetti inside your extruder. The differences in formulation, diameter…
Why TPU Speed Settings Are Different From Everything Else If you’ve ever tried to print TPU at the same speed as PLA, you already know the result: tangled filament, jammed extruder, and a ruined print. Flexible filaments play by completely different rules, and the most critical rule is speed. Get it wrong and you’ll spend…
TPU was the filament that almost made me quit 3D printing. My first attempt ended with a tangled blob of rubbery spaghetti wrapped around the extruder gears. My second attempt wasn’t much better. But once I figured out the quirks of printing flexible filaments, it became one of my favorite materials. Phone cases, drone bumpers,…