I need a certain, rather complex shaped, flexible rubber gasket for a Dyson vacuum cleaner. Cutting it by hand would be a pain in the rear. My idea is to 3D-print it on my Ender. And now for my questions. a) Is it a myth, that you cannot use flexible filament I a bowden extruder? b) If no, does anyone of you guys can propose a material, that might be suitable for the above job? Thanks a lot!
I would rather convert the printer to direct drive first. There are various variations which are not expensive. I went with a cheap BMG extruder clone.
I have been rather successful with Overture’s High Speed TPU. It prints really well with my Bowden tube setup and it has a semi-rigid outer shell that goes away during extrusion. It sounds like exactly what you are looking for.
It’s tricky but not impossible, I’ve done it with my Ender 3. You do need a different extruded though as the stock one has too large of a gap and the filament can easily kink and escape it. Clone BMG is a good choice, but you can also print a version of the stock one with tighter filament path. If you aren’t going to print flexibles more, you can keep it bowden - adding the mass of a DD brings its own problems. After that it’s just a matter of very slow primt speed (like 15mm/s slow) and little to no retraction using 95 TPU.
I was curious and so just bought a small spooll of JAYO TPU Flexible Filament form Amazon. Works fairly well on my stock Ender 3. I get usable prints, if perhaps not the highest quality. But that’s with zero tuning other than bed and nozzle temps.
