Cura 4.3 - cura profile settings - TPU (direct drive)

Alright people, welcome to my video on my TPU profile. It is important to keep in mind that I did just set my Android 3 up for direct drive using the Divinator. It is a printable direct drive mount. You can see that video on my channel, it is the previous video to this one. This, however, is going to be our profile for TPU and in fact I've already gone through and set everything up because I've been doing some test printing and dialing in for the direct drive. So we're just going to go over the settings real quick and I'll show you what I've changed. Now, the very top of the list, the first thing I changed was my layer height. I took it down from the standard 0.2 millimeters to 0.1 millimeters and the reason for that is the less plastic that I'm trying to extrude when it comes to TPU, the more evenly it'll flow, the less retraction there will be, the less jamming and binding there will be in the hot end. So I could take this down even lower and get a higher print quality but for right now that's pretty low and we're going to leave it just like that. So wall thickness, wall line count, all of that stuff stayed the same. You're welcome to change the bottom pattern and all of that. I just noticed my horizontal expansion is on and I'm not sure why, so we're just going to get rid of that. And then my infill density at the moment is 20. It's a decent percentage for TPU. If you turn it up a little bit you will get a little bit less squish. If you turn it down you'll get a little more squish but you are going to want some sort of infill in there because it is a flexible filament and you would be hard pressed to print the top of this skull bridging with it. So obviously you want to use infill. The most important settings when it comes to TPU are going to be right in here in the material settings. If you look I have my bed temperature set to 230, or excuse me, my nozzle temperature set to 230. That is mid-range. It could go up, could go down depending on the flow of that particular TPU. My build plate temperature is at 55. Now with TPU you're going to want to keep it below 60 degrees, so that's just good practice. Flow rate obviously 100%. We don't mess with that too much. I do have retraction enabled but I have changed my distance from the normal 6 to 8 millimeters to 1.4 millimeters and lowered my retraction speed to 25. Now this one is the one that matters because this one is calculated and only set if these two are the same. If you look here you'll notice that my prime speed is set to 10 millimeters a second. Now what happens in the retraction process is the retraction is the pullback of the filament and in theory you can pull the TPU back as quickly as you want. The thing you need to watch out for is the prime speed. Now this is the speed at which it feeds it back into the tube or replaces the piece it just pulled out and if this is too high the friction between the rubbery plastic TPU and the entrance to the Bowden tube can cause it to push to a side and then jam and that's how you get printing problems with TPU. So the lower the prime speed the better your results are going to be as far as not getting jammed up with the filament. Again I am using direct drive so I don't have to force it down the Bowden tube and that's one of the reasons my retraction distance is so low. Print speed also needs to be reduced quite a bit. I have mine set at 35 millimeters per second right now. That's pretty slow but again we are printing TPU and we want to move slowly and press evenly to extrude the filament in order to get a nice even model. It's not as free-flowing as say a PLA. We do want print cooling on. I have it on. I have it at 100 percent and at the moment I'm using a brim and tree supports for this skull here. We're going to be printing this in a Polymaker TPU pretty shortly here but that'll be a different video. That'll be a review video but I do have my tree support on and I have it set to brim. These are optional. You can set them on a per model basis as well as the support here which I don't have turned on but the fan, the print speed, the retraction settings, and the temperature you're going to want those all to be consistent. Now that I have that I'm going to go to my settings, profile, manage profiles, and what you would do in your case after setting these settings like in all the other videos is go to create. I have actually already created mine right here. It's Cura Ender 3 TPU and we are going to go in. We'll just rename it real quick because I did just change this from 0.2 to 0.1 and I like to be able to see what I'm working with. So now as you can see I've got most of my profile set up. I can just go in here and the nice thing is if I want to switch I can just grab this and here are all my profiles listed. I can go right to my ABS and right back to my POA or to my TPU. You can see it adjusts all my settings here. Apparently I didn't save that properly. You know what let's just double check since we're here and make sure everything is where we want it to be. That's right. One last time, profile, manage profiles, and in fact all I really need to do is switch and click keep and then when I switch back it holds those for me. So I am going to save this properly though. Profile, manage profiles, and then what you're looking for in order to change it and set the settings to update with current settings override. So now when I jump around everything stays the same. You can see my height stayed the same and all that. So that's it for my TPU profile. I'm going to be getting into these TPU prints really soon so stay tuned guys. Don't forget to hit the like button, subscribe to my channel. We are at this moment 26 subscribers away from a thousand at which point we will do a little dance in our living room and have some sort of celebration. I think we are very very close to our Patreon goal. If you haven't seen our call to action video we were trying to get our Patreon account up to ten dollars a month before we hit that thousand subscribers and if we can do that we'll hold off on advertisements in the videos until we hit 2,500 and then we'll re-evaluate. At the moment our Patreon account is sitting at eight dollars a month so one person with a two dollar a month donation could be the difference between having ads on this channel. I implore you to definitely pop over to my Patreon page and check it out. I'll leave a link in the description down below. And like I said if you like this content don't forget to subscribe because we got a lot more coming. This is the final settings video for the Ender 3. Pretty soon we'll be getting into the Ender 5 settings and stuff like that but first we have a lot of setup on that to do. It's actually not here yet so it'll be a couple more days but yeah Technivorous out. And as always guys I am Technivorous. Thanks for watching this video. Don't forget to hit the like button. You can subscribe right here by clicking on the icon and I put a couple videos up in the corner. One of them is going to be my latest video, my latest upload and the other one is going to be what YouTube recommends for you so feel free to check those out. Don't forget to hit that bell for notifications down below and we'll see you guys next time.