Retraction settings with E3D-v6 - Slower is better

[lignumaqua]

I think I may have seen this mentioned somewhere else on this forum, however, having struggled for the last week with severe stringing with PLA when I upgraded my Rostock Max V2 to use an E3D v6 head I thought it might be worth mentioning again. It might help somebody else struggling with the same issue.

Just about all the advice you read about reducing stringing tells you to increase the retraction rate as much as you can. In practice, with this combination of a long Bowden extruder and E3D head, I found precisely the opposite to be the case! I got best results, way better than with faster speeds, when using a slow retraction speed of 30 mm/s or less. The 100 mm/s + recommended speeds were awful.

For now, I've settled on 2 to 3 mm retraction at 30 mm/s for PLA.

Note: I'm not doubting that for many machines increasing retraction speeds may be a good thing for stringing, but for my Rostock Max 2 wih standard Bowden and an E3D v6 extruder, it isn't.

[Tincho85]

Yes sir, I'm using 30mm/s with my v6 and never had a jam with PLA.
1.2 - 1.8 mm retracts, but this is with an air extruder setup.

[RandomFactor]

Agreed. Also, increasing the travel speed for non print moves to something greater than 150mm/sec seems to help a lot.

[travelphotog]

I seem to have an odd ball Max and V6 setup for some reason then. I run 5mm retracts at 125mm retract speed and it works like a charm for me. I know all printers have their own needs and desires. A few are even down right a pain in the tail it seems when it comes to the V6 and PLA. But I got lucky somehow I guess.. I did have jams early on and I did the oil thing for a bit, but then stopped doing it. No clue why but these days only reason I get a jam is if I abort a print. It does tend to jam if I do not feed, then manually retract the filament a bit. it just makes the bulge at the end of the filament in that case, but not a jam in the nozzle or such.