Teflon Liner Cracked?

[rampeh]

I've been having trouble with jams trying to get my first print working successfully (I've had a few cubes complete printing but still tweaking things, my guess is extruder was loose, i've tightened it now).

I had a big jam yesterday so attempted to test the heat settings by turning the hot end on and manually feeding filament through. I noticed a teflon liner peeking out the top so decided to take apart the hot end and clean out my nozzle using a blowtorch as mentioned somewhere else in one of these threads.

I've noticed that the liner peeking out had a smaller internal diameter and the liner was made up of two concentric teflon tubes (the inner one was the one peeking out). I pushed it back in a bit (you can see it still poking out a bit in the picture. Anyway the main thing i'm worried about is the crack along the side of the teflon. I don't remember this before. the inner tube is unharmed. Will this be an issue?

[img]http://i.imgur.com/9pArara.jpg[/img]

[mhackney]

That's normal! The outer tube has a slit in it to make it easier to slide the inner tube inside.

What type of filament are you using? PLA really needs a fan on the hot end barrel to cool it - otherwise you will get jams.

Regards,
Michael

[rampeh]

I am indeed using PLA, and my next order of business is finding myself a small fan I can mount on my hot end

[mhackney]

You will be delighted with the results! I struggled for a few weeks before adding a fan and haven't looked back!