Adventures in TPU

After getting everything pretty much perfect for PLA, it was obviously time to break it again and give TPU a whirl.

I ordered a cute little spool of Sainsmart N95 TPU filament a while back, so I swapped it in and made a new profile based on the Generic N95 filament and the 0.3mm profile I had been using for most of my PLA work.

The only changes I made were setting the print speed down to 20mm/sec as everything I see on the internet says slow is the way to go with TPU and setting the bed temperature to 50.

I had no problem swapping in the new filament by extruding the leftover PLA and pushing the TPU in after it with the hot end set to 225 degrees. I backed off the spring in the extruder a bit so it wouldn't squish the filament too much. Extruded for a while and eventually the black TPU started coming out of the nozzle in place of the yellow PLA.

I smeared glue stick on the flexible PEI build plate since the internet also tells me TPU sticks way too hard to PEI.

Rather than do a bunch of calibration prints, I just went directly for a piece I designed a while back: A replacement jaw pad for my DeWalt trigger clamp. Here's the printed version versus the good pad from the clamp:

And here are both of them back on the clamp:

It was indeed flexible enough to squeeze over the jaw, but is quite secure now that it is attached. Looks like a good replacement.

The glue seemed to work, I didn't have much trouble removing the print, and the glue washed off the flexible plate and the pad easily.

So at long last my goal of being able to print TPU after swapping in the Titan Aero has been achieved.

P.S. DeWalt doesn't sell replacement pads, they actually sent me a brand new clamp when I inquired about it, so now that I've replaced the busted pad, I have an extra clamp :-). This is the DeWalt model DWHT83139 six inch clamp.

I've put this on thingiverse as DeWalt trigger clamp jaw

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