bigger nozzle = faster prints?

[tjd10684]

Ok so I got stuff to stick to my bed pretty reliably now. Now I want to go faster. To be honest I mostly end up printing little organizing bins for stuff or boxes for stuff like that ram Drew is selling for me. Most of this stuff is not really detailed or intricate so I have been thinking maybe it would be faster to go with a bigger nozzle and more layer height to try to get faster prints. I already have a full range of nozzles up to 1mm but I am thinking I want to try .8.

So my question is if I am running a 0.8 nozzle what should my max layer height be? Is there a rule of thumb for nozzle dia to max layer height? What about speed? I currently print at 80mm/min Can I still print that fast or am I going to have to slow down? Speed up? I can't see that changing nozzle size would warrant a change in nozzle temp but ???

[RuleOfSines]

General rule of thumb, for fast get it done prints, height can be 80% of nozzle diameter. For better quality, 50%.

As for Speed, you have to keep in mind that the more plastic you're pushing, the faster you have to melt it. This can be achieved with higher temps, or a different hotend. From what I remember the Volcano is geared towards putting down a lot of plastic real fast:
Volcano HotEnd – E3D Online (e3d-online.com)

[tjd10684]

Right now I am running a MicroSwiss all metal hot end. Its still using the stock heater element but the heat break is titanium and this does seam to keep the heat pretty concentrated in the heater block.

[boarder2k7]

Print speed with larger nozzles is usually governed by the melting capabilities of your hotend. For high flow scenarios you'll need something with an extended melt zone and larger heater like the E3D Volcano. What you'll find is that you can compensate somewhat with increased temperatures, but at some point you'll overcome your ability to melt the plastic fast enough and the extruder will start slipping. MicroSwiss doesn't gain you anything in melt zone so its throughput won't be significantly different from another standard hotend. The better heatbreak just keeps your melt zone more clearly defined and the all metal design is just a bit easier to deal with because you ditch the crappy PTFE tube setup which can be bad for maintenance. I know mine was always a bit of a pain.

Which printer do you have? Also are you really printing at 80 mm/min? That's really slow.

[tjd10684]

80mm/s sorry about that used to inches per min in machining

[tjd10684]

Sorry I never answered your question about what printer I have. I have an Ender 5

[boarder2k7]

Gotcha. If you really want to print way faster I'd put a direct drive volcano (or clone) on it so you can push more plastic.

One other thing that can make a big difference in print speeds is getting a good feel for how things slice. For example sometimes adding an extra wall or increasing the extrusion width a little bit will get rid of an area that was otherwise an infill move. Infill is much slower than continuous edges because the machine has to stop and change direction (accel and jerk effects) while constant perimeter lines are relatively faster. Sometimes printing a part solid with those tweaks can even be faster than printing it with infill (depending on size/geometry/etc of course)