So I am on my second CTC Dual. Immediately after receiving this one, I noticed that it took a lot longer to heat up in order to print. I can set it to preheat, and it will timeout before it is heated up. Currently I am at about an hour of preheating so I can load some abs filament, and I am hovering around the 218 degree mark. Any ideas of what to tweak to get it to heat it up properly, or do you think I have bad thermocouplers?
either it’s not heating up enough because the heater isn’t working right, or it is heating up enough but the thermocouple is under reading.
If if its the thermocouple under reading, you’ll be able to manually load filament by pushing it into the hole in the extruder.
Loose or poorly mounted thermocouple might cause underreads.
If it’s the heater you have no option but to replace.
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I would lean towards advising you to return this if it is new.
If you did not buy it new, then I would advise reflashing the firmware. (sailfish)
I have already submitted a support ticket with CTC and am playing the waiting game to hear back. I will look into sailfish, I hear many switching to it.
Is it possible to get hotter thermocouplers so that I can print Nylon? If so any ideas on what to get.
To be clear, your printer is already loaded with a version of sailfish, I am pretty sure.
The thermocouple (not thermocoupler) is simply a temperature measuring device. There is also a heater element attached to the hot end, and that is what does the heating. The signal from the thermocouple is used by the software running on the mightyboard to control power to the heater element, and consequently, the temperature.
The problem you’d have is that the temperature of the hot end is limited in the firmware. A more powerful heater or replacement thermocouple will not change that.
Your themocouple is not the issue. Your extruder hotend is. Your hotend has a PTFE tube, that degrades at temperatures above 230c. You would want to replace this with an all metal hot end to get higher temperatures.
BUT my advice before you go out and start doing all this is:
Read the flashforge gooogle group, so you can learn your printer.
Spend a few monthes getting to the point where you can print well, before you go off trying to do exotics.
I think I have an issue with both the heating element and the thermocouple®. Taking measurements the Left heating element is reading 130-140 C, when the lcd on the CTC is displaying 190C. The right heating element is displaying a greater discrepancy.
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When I power it up, it says “The Replicator” and “Firmware Version 7.5”
