Expanding the Organic Material Evolution

WillowFlex Quick Printing Guide

Basic Settings for Printing with WillowFlex

In general WillowFlex is a forgiving material that requires no special settings and is easy to print with.

To get started, use the following settings with your FDM printer:

  • Temperature: 175-185°C
  • Speed: 50 – 70 mm/s
  • Platform: Cooled Bed
  • Cooling: Normal Active Cooling (recommended)
  • Adhesion: Printing Tape, Glue or similar to get strong adhesion to build plate.

If you have more specific questions or needs, we recommend that you take a look at our FAQs.

Airwolf FDM 3D Printer
Typical Bowden Extruder Head

Printing with WillowFlex on a Bowden Extruder

WillowFlex-Bowden Cheat Sheet

  • Use Maximum Active Cooling above 2nd layer
  • Retract at 100mm/s
  • Retract to the filament outside of the suspension area + 2mm
  • Soft pressure between the feed and the back-pressure gears
  • Print speed between 30 – 50 mm/s
  • Consistent print speed (inner/outer/cover/infill)
  • Minimum of 10s per layer print-time

A bit more detail about the settings:

Basic advice: Get a good active cooling system for your printer and cool as much as possible beginning with the second layer.

Everything stands and falls with the Retraction: Retract deeply and quickly to prevent oozing. A retraction rate of 100mm/s should work.

You will also need find the maximum retraction distance: retract until the suspension of the Filament is hidden in the hose, and then and 2 mm further. We tested on the NBEO printer and the depth was 6.8mm.

Don’t squeeze the Filament! WillowFlex offers a very good grip on the feed wheel. So you can adjust the pressure of the gears to be very gentle.

Print with constant speed (inner/ outer cover & infill). We got the best results with 30mm/s – 50mm/s.

We recommend a minimum print time of 10 seconds per layer.