3D Printing Forum

Trying to reduce the amount of constant maintenance the my ender 3 printers require and one of the biggest issues i’m having is a buildup of sticky residue inside the ptfe tube inside the hotend/ptfe tube. It’s not leaking as i visually inspect before cleaning and i can see where the tube connects and there’s a clear line and no visible signs of leakage. Usually some rubbing alcohol and a scrub brush will fix the issue for about 100hours of print time before needing to clean it again.

Running this with the extruder mounted on the X axis (if there's a proper direct drive mod for the ender 3 i would love to try it)

Things i have tried:

• less heat printing at 200 instead of 205 - marginal / no difference

• printing speed turned down to 20mm/s - it takes longer for the buildup to become an issue but it also takes as long for the prints to complete

• lowered retraction distance from 7mm to 3mm - i thought the high retraction distance might be causing issues, while it made it better it did not fix the issue

new to forum not sure why image tags aren't rendering.

Yeah that's something I encountered on my CR-10 stock hot ends and upgraded to all metal, direct drive setups. The tube would start to get cooked and cause extrusion (under extrusion) issues.

There are a lot of nice upgrades out there. I love the Bondtech DDX upgrades