TPU Tuning

Protyping flexible keychains and correcting 3D printing problems.

Tue Jun 06 2023

We’ve been wanting to protype flexible multicolor keychains at Joy³, so I picked a name went to blender, made a model, sliced it, and printed it out.

3D Printed Keychain with heavy stringing

Oops! So much stringing. What did I do wrong? Well, first I figured out that I had Z-hop enabled. Z-hop is already a stringing risk and should never be used for TPU. Then I decided to check if I had the right temp and created a temperature tower, which let me know that I should be running at 205°C, not 220°C.

3D Printed temperature tuning tower in TPU

If you’re paying attention you probably noticed that the temperature tower actually shows the best quality around the 235°C mark, but I printed starting at 230°C and didn’t feel like changing the model because… lazy.

Making those changes gave us much better results:

3D Printed Keychain with no stringing