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Hi everyone,

My friends and are I looking into making an attachment for 3D printers to help prevent jams and also fix them, this would be a universal attachment that could go on any printer. Does anyone know of anything like this? Or have any suggestions? Thanks

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I assume you mean a print head/nozzle getting clogged during a print?

I do not know of any device available to prevent that.

However, having said that, it has been my experience that once you have figured out the right combination of print temperature/speed/flow settings for a specific printer and material, the problem of having a clogged nozzle almost disappears.

With my first printers I had many problems with clogged nozzles, clicking extruders, etc. After many attempts and experiments, this has now been resolved almost completey.

About 41/2 months ago, I bought my third printer. It is now busy doing its 205th print and has been printing a total of 1600+ hours (with a longest print so far of 102 hours).

I have had exactly TWO times that a nozzle clogged and that was on the first and second day of use. Printer is used for multiple materials and, so far, has proved to be very reliable. Enough so in any case that last Monday, I received my forth printer, same make and model.

So I am not sure what kind of attachment I would need to prevent a jam of any kind.

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I recommend researching the specific problems that people are having with extruders and then work backwards from there. Ask yourself how can I design an extruder that would avoid such and such problem.

Here are some problems that I’ve encountered:

-Switching from one material to another and old material residue stays in extruder causing a jam.

-Extruder gear grinds away filament in one spot to the point where there is nothing to grip; therefore no extrusion.

-Brass nozzle wearing down over time because it is a soft metal.

Also, due to the variety in FDM printer designs, I would recommend going after a specific design like Prusa-type printers. This would cover a huge segment of the market (30% +) but still be a manageable project.

Creating a flawless extruder is the holy grail of FDM printer design, so best of luck! I hope to be a customer in the future.

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