No slipping, no grinding: not always a good thing!

Let your filament slip, your bowden tube pop up... or break something !

If the filament cannot slip nor be ground a bit,
excessive pressure has to "break" something anyway.

Now for sure, and I can prove it: my driving system is very efficient and my bowden stays well clamped...

When I tighten the idler completely to the maximum, the driving bolt grips the filament so well that the weakest point in the feeder mechanism becomes the PTFE bowden tube resistance itself.

As you can see on the pictures, my PTFE bowden tube got stretched and stripped in the pneumatic push-fit connector!

This seriously clogs the nozzle and it becomes a real drawback in the end: check my analysis below.

3D printing with a smaller nozzle diameter

For sure, a smaller nozzle produces finer details,
but how tricky and troublesome it can be!

Is it worth using a smaller nozzle on a 3D printer?

I changed my hot end after my experiments with cheap nylon trimmer line, and it happened I had a 0.3 mm nozzle around. Was it worthwhile for even finer prints?


True, you can / do get finer details... but once again, there are trade-offs. And as for me, I will still mostly use a larger nozzle for the reasons I explain below.