Soap mold with flexifil on UP mini

thingiverse

I've been testing Flexifil from Formfutura to make soap molds. A normal extrusion temp should be around 210C, meaning I set it on PLA settings initially but that didn't work out well. What worked surprisingly was setting it to ABS temperature - it would only extrude once and turned out to be pure luck for a beginner like me. Removing the raft was also not an option; the model and raft were fused together somehow. With PLA, the filament would barely extrude before clogging the extruder-inlet near the PVC bearing block. It dawned on me that reading between the lines of forums indicated I needed to adjust the gap between the extruder inlet and its bearing. Upon closer inspection, I realized my mistake - the extruder inlet sits 4.5mm below the nozzle assembly, while I was told the ideal distance is zero or as minimal as possible. Turns out, I'd misread the filament diameter which is actually 2mm instead of the expected 1.75mm. The higher ABS temperature compensates for a lower extrusion temperature, but this creates other problems like sticking to models due to excessive heat. Drilling the extruder inlet with a 2.3mm drill fixed both PLA and clogging issues while removing rafts no longer proves challenging. If anyone is facing similar problems with Flexifil: double-check filament diameters if they're above 1.75mm; try drilling the inlet tube if that's the case. Ensure spools are tightened on reels, too - excessive friction makes extruders work harder and sometimes leads to complete stoppages. One more tip - I make sure wall thickness in my designs doesn't exceed 1mm, which greatly improves overall structural integrity of prints produced from this flexible filament material. Note: the gap between "designs" and "print", although not exactly, implies there might have been problems before redesigning some details like models' size and extruder setup settings