Keep Dust And Debris Out Of Your Hotend With This Simple Print

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In today's video we take a look at filament cleaners. They are a great way to keep dust and dirt out of your hotend and extruder. Having many spools of filament open, they help make sure the only think making it into my hotend is the intended filament.

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NEREUS - Lotus

[SkippyTheLost]

I’m in the middle of doing several ~20hr prints, and now seems like the best time to add a filament cleaner.

[Robothut]

I just use a clothes pin and piece of micro fiber cloth. The spring loaded clothes pins has built in round openings so the filament does not get pinched to tightly. Supper easy to use and fast to set up since it just clips around the filament.

[GregsMakerCorner]

Excellent tips, great video! One of my biggest fails was sanding wood (from a laser project). I forgot to cover up my filament roll, and ended up having sawdust collect on it. I didn't notice until after I was printing. Sawdust doesn't do well in 3d printer hot ends.. lol. It took me a while to clear out that jam, but lesson learned! I've also found using a filament filter (with a dry sponge) works well like the one you showed in the video.

[arnauescarihuelaalcoverro]

Preventive like with Modbot never disappoints

[ltribley]

Yes, use some sort of foam filter. Not only will it clean off dust and other particles, but will prevent insect body debris (either from your home or more commonly, manufacturer) from being entombed in the print. Don't consider oil.

Dry your filament. Filament stored in the open will eventually need to be dried out. The print quality is like "night and day" after the moisture is removed. Keep a temperature, humidity digital display in your printing room.

Store in inexpensive heavy duty double seal "ziplock" style bags. IKEA 6L ISTAD (model) bags are perfect, double seal, cheap, and reliable. They will hold standard and wide bodied spools with plenty of room for desiccant if you like.

Dry spools in BULK for the colors needed for a project or series of projects, not one at a time. Do not waste $$$ on specialized filament dryers. Instead get yourself a 5 gallon bucket, drill 4 5mm holes equally spaced just up from the base. Purchase an inexpensive circular NESCO, American Harvest Food Dehydrator Jerky Maker with variable temperature control (or similar as long as its diameter is large enough to sit on top of the bucket). SImply place the control, heating unit on top of the bucket and start drying. It will handle upwards of 5 1kg spools per batch and is a necessity if you're doing multimaterial printing.

[HauntedCorpseGaming]

Cool little design.

Having used a 0.2mm nozzle clogging and had to clean it a few times for impurities that didn't make their way through. It is really good to clean the dust/etc off the filament before it enters to be melted, at 0.4mm I never had an issue with clogging.

For myself I just literally took a piece of foam from the packing from my printer, cut a cylinder then cut a line to the center, finally wedged it onto the top of the filament going into the printer so it cleans it from all angles before it enters the bowing 2 seconds, lol.

[mcorrade]

very cool. I put ALL my filament spools in bags. Its a pain but I've been doing since day one and it seems to do the trick.

[ld-dmaker]

oiling with TINY droplets of oil has helped me battle jams due to heat creep (caused by a couple models with hundreds of retractions each layer) as it helps the PLA not stick as much to the hot titanium heatbreak on a particularly hot day (like 30°+ ambient temp)

[rentaspoon]

You can cut the sponge with a slit in the middle, that way you don't get to much tension and can add and remove the sponge

[TripodsGarage]

Great idea! Keep up the great content!

[delscoville]

My first 12 rolls, came in mylar bags with desiccant. However the zip-locks on those bags wouldn't all stay sealed and most of those rolls became too brittle to even feed into the printer. I've since ran them all through a food dehydrator and only a couple I haven't fixed yet, they've been sitting in the dehydrator for a few days now, and may just give up on them. Luckily they were all protected from gathering dust. Since I have a bigger printer now, and some prints can take days, I picked up a Sunlu dryer, just to keep the filament dry while printing, it's designed for the spool to be rotating, so not a good device to use as a primary dryer. Also when a roll is out of the new zip-lock bags I toss the desiccant in the food dehydrator to "recharge" it. I may start swapping all the desiccant in all the bags for fresh desiccant and put them in the dehydrator and just practice rotating them weekly. I don't live in a particularly humid area, but a decent collection of filament can be a few hundred dollars, worth protecting. Now if I can only prevent every print failure... lol

[iinfinite]

I sometimes zip-tie 2 cotton balls on my filament so that it gets a wipe down before going into my extruder, no oil though. The cotton balls end up so dirty and do a great job of catching any dog hair. I change them pretty often

[Crazyates]

I think Chuck from Filament Friday recommends oiling if your Bowden tube is too restrictive, or your retractions are stringy from a tight Bowden tube.

[KRich]

I am going to try using a pellet dehumidifier in a sealed plastic container to store my Filament the stuff works great in a closet or for keeping a camper dry during storage I don't know if it will work for this I'll know in a few months I asked on some forums if anyone has done this? with no response. I'm just getting into the Filament printing I already have a M2P and Saturn resin printers but because they are expensive for large parts I went and purchased a Ender 3 v2 yesterday with a bunch of upgrades I didn't but any fancy filament yet that's for later when master the basics. Great videos keep em coming 🙂😃😁

[reidn]

Regarding debris, dust, etc - check out the vacuum seal bags. A lot of companies are jumping on it for filament spools, so there's a price premium for bags that fit a single roll, but you can also just get ones made for things like sheets or other sizes. I use those and toss in a bag of silica/alumina for rolls of nylon, PVB, PETGs, and PEEKs.

Another easy alternative: print with a 1.6mm nozzle 😁

[objection_your_honor]

I started with a RepRap I built in 2011.
I've used the cleaner since then. I do put 1 drop of vegetable oil, but mainly to attract the dust and junk that a dry sponge will not attract.
I have not noticed any degradation of the prints, but never have I had to deal with clogged anything.
I haven't tried more than 1 drop, so I can't say if it's any good or not. I recommend people try it and see for themselves for a few prints.

[avejst]

great video as always 👍😀
thanks for sharing your experience with all of us 👍😀

[drdd]

Just like a cast iron pot putting a bit of oil on the filament so it can get into the hot end will "Season" the nozzle making it smoother and filling all the tiny tooling imperfections.

[minnow]

I only use oil for all metal hotends. It's the same concept as a cooking pan where you season a pan with oil to make it non stick. It makes the inside the of hotend non stick and I have never experienced a jam with my all metal hotends before. I use an oiler once every 6 months or so then go back to a non oiled sponge for dust protection since I print in my garage and the printers are out in the open.

[woodwaker]

Good ideas. I just had to replace a filament run out sensor, when I opened it there was a lot of crud, and more interesting the micro switch hook had been worn through. 3 years and probably 75 spools.