Flexible Filament

[GoatBoy]

Got out to the field this weekend to try out some new stuff.



I keep losing little things like detents and fill nipple covers, plus I wanted to change the dimensions of some of them. All of these are printed with “flexible” filament.

The detents are “Ego” style, but I lengthened them just a bit to fight doublefeeds, which I start getting when the normal detents are just minor-league worn out.

The interesting one is the bumper. It seems that a certain pet thread on this subject got deleted, which is a real shame because I was looking forward to resurrecting it on its... 12th anniversary?

The detail of the bumper is a little clearer in the rendering:



Regular Ninjaflex durometer is 85A. I think this is softer than the blue bumper, but seemingly stiffer than the clear one. But the “give” of a printed bumper might be adjustable via infill and perimeter settings.

While I was at it, I added an inner shoulder to fit into the groove on the power tube to lock it in. Neither the clear bumpers nor the blue bumpers really seem to fit correctly into the groove, which allows them to go flying off and I think is the root cause of bumper wear.

I inspected the Ninjaflex bumper after today and there’s zero wear on it, although a typical day for me is only like 200-300 cycles. But I’ve seen blue bumpers that lose their inner ring rubbing against the power tube in that many cycles.