It's easy to overlook the importance of your printer nozzle. It's one of the most important parts of your 3D printer, and yet few people know how to take care of it.
If you want to get the best quality prints possible, make sure that you are taking good care of your nozzle. Keep reading for some tips on how to do this!
What is 3D Printer Nozzle?
A 3D printer nozzle is the device that pushes the filament into the heated extrude. The filament is then melted and then pushed through a hot end to create a 3D object. This guide will show you how to clean your 3D printer nozzle to make sure it creating high quality items like it was designed to do.
Why Clean the Nozzle?
To run a 3D print smoothly and without any filament deviation, you need to make sure the nozzle is clean. During printing in an enclosed space like your desk, there is bound to be little bits of dust that fly into the air and settle on your desk. Imagine how that becomes worse when you're dealing with such fine particles like plastic.
Any time you pull filament through a nozzle it pulls these little bits of particles with it, which will build up over time on the inside surface of your nozzle. This accumulation of particulate matter will gradually decrease flow rates until eventually the nozzle starts extruding unevenly or clogs altogether. To get good quality prints regularly it's necessary to keep things running smooth and clean.
Only cleaning the nozzle can do that for you, because while that particulate is inside the nozzle it's not just impacting printing quality it's also stuck on your print and can seriously affect its final appearance and quality too.
How to Clean the Nozzle?
It's important to know how to clean your 3D printer nozzle so that you avoid clogged nozzles and prints! If you have a 3D printer, it's likely that you have run into the issue of cleaning the nozzle at some point. Fortunately, it is easy enough to do, and will go a long way towards ensuring that your prints are the best quality they can be. Here are some steps to clean the nozzle:
Step1: Turn off and unplug your printer.
Step2: Heat up the nozzle to printing temperature. This can be done by putting it in ABS or PLA printing mode, but if you don't know how to do that, just right click on the "solid cube" model and delete it from your print queue.
Step3: Once the temperature of the nozzle is reached, remove your filament from the pick3dprinter. Be careful not to burn yourself on the exposed metal. Don't worry, it won't hurt you if you touch it, but it can definitely hurt if you aren't careful!
Step4: Push gently down on the back of the filament and slowly pull it back out. You may see gunk coming off in the form of a thick liquid. This is good!
Step5: If you removed all of the filament, put it back in and continue printing. If there is still some sticking out, simply cut it off.
Step6: Clean the nozzle with iso-propyl alcohol or other similar chemicals until everything looks squeaky clean! Be sure to do this carefully so that you don't touch the hot metal part again.
Conclusion
Cleaning your nozzle is one of the most important parts of maintaining a 3D printer. If you neglect to clean it, eventually filament will start getting clogged in there and making extruder not works properly. Don't be discouraged if this happens just follow these steps for how to clean a 3d printer nozzle!