A little trick to keep your nozzle clean and your filament flowing

Many people get worried about that little blob on the end of the nozzle and stress about keeping it clean. I say leave it and use it. I consider it a cap that prevents dust and other things from actually getting the nozzle so use it like that.

Other people wonder why when they print a skirt nothing shows up for have the loop and then out is comes but you can't really see much to tell if you are in good shape to continue the print. Lets fix that.

I have a little piece of Gcode that will help you keep things clears and keep the filament flowing smoothly.

What this does is raise the extruder about 5 mm and extrude about 13mm of filament enough to form a little pile and then resets the filament counter and starts the print. What I do is I turn on the heater let it get to the proper temp for the object and then run the job.
What happens is this the print job start by going to home and raising the extruder 5mm and extrudes 13mm of filament if all is normal I end up with a tiny little pile of filament I then put my tweezers around the nozzle tip and wait I just wait poised and when the nozzle begins to move to actually start the print THAT is when I click close the tweezers and as I do so I let the nozzle scrape over the top of the tweezers scraping it clean and I leave the tip of the nozzle full of readily available fresh filament that can start being laid down within seconds and flows right out very nicely as the beginning of the skirt goes down. Killed two birds with one tweezers.


Now if the nozzle is partially blocked when you see the extruder start to move but nothing is being extruded simply close the tweezers on the nozzle tip to scrap across it and usually that opens it right up and the filament comes right out and you can continue on

Give it a shot it works to prevents clogs and gives you a good start to your print job

Here is the Gcode I use and you can set it to appear in every print job in your slic3r profile


G1 Z5 F5000 ; lift nozzle
G92 E0 ;zero the extruded length
G1 F200 E13 ;extrude 13mm of feed stock
G92 E0 ;zero the extruded length again

on a MAC or PC it is the same thing. Go to the Slic3r config menu and the last tab Printer Settings and the Item Custom Gcode you will see two boxes for start and one for end put this code in the start box. Save the profile and use that profile when you slice.

your skirt should begin to print as soon as it should without waiting for the flow of the filament to start and the nozzle should be kept fairly clear.

Good luck

 

I personally do not but you can see what happens if you enter the commands one by one in the manual control gcode command window. Just got down with a move and don;t see the Robo being back up until next week I could try and get a vid then.

If you want to try
home the printer heat up the nozzle
and then enter these one at a time
G1 Z5 F5000
G92 E0
G1 F200 E13
G92 E0

The info after the semicolon was all simply a comment describing what each command does