Capricorn XS Series PTFE Bowden Tubing for 1.75mm Filament
One Meter of our flagship PTFE Tubing, enhanced with a proprietary blend of high performance additives. 1.9mm inner, 4mm outer diameter for 1.75mm filaments.
This is, hands down, the single best PTFE Bowden tubing you can buy for your home 3D printer.
Guaranteed to always be the right diameter, and perfectly round.
Print flexible filaments without the binding up that happens with over-diameter tubes.
Each meter of tubing comes with one Capricorn sticker to decorate your printer.
1 meter
| Our Premium XS Series Dark Blue Tubing |
| Additives |
Blue Color and Secret High Lubricity Additive Mixture |
| Best For Chunky Filaments |
YES |
| Best For Flexible Filaments |
YES |
| Can See Through |
NO |
| Pulling Friction♠
|
0.8 |
| Color |
Dark Blue |
| Density (kg/m3) |
2300 +/-100 |
| Hardness |
60-65 |
| Inner Diameter (mm) |
1.90 +/- 0.05 |
| Linear Thermal Expansion at 250 °C |
2.2-3.3% |
| Material |
Highest Quality Pure Virgin PTFE |
| Melting Point (°C)♥
|
up to 340 |
| Outer Diameter |
3.95 +/- 0.05 |
| Roundness (ϵ) |
< 0.1 |
| Stiffness§
|
Medium High |
| Thermal Conductivity (W/m-k) |
0.25 |
| Wear Rate (gm/s) |
0.01 |
| Young's Modulus (GPa)¥
|
0.53 |
|
♠Pulling Friction is calculated as the average force required to pull 1.2 meters of 1.75mm PLA filament through 1 meter of tubing at a constant speed, relative to 1 meter of cheap white reference tubing. Note that although we observed the friction of the TL series to be about the same or even slightly lower than our XS series, it also has a larger internal diameter. |
|
§Other Bowden tubes may vary significantly in stiffness, depending on the material from which they're made. Our tubing generally tends to be more flexible than most, with the TL being more flexible than XS. |
|
¥Young's Modulus (YM) is the measure of elasticity of the material. Our XS Series additives give the PTFE a slightly greater YM than the TL Series. |
|
♥Temperatures were approximated by heating samples of all tubing simultaneously, observing how quickly each one began to deform. Printer failures may happen at significantly lower temperatures. |
Your extruder system has a finite amount of pushing force. You want as much as possible of that pushing force to be used to generate pressure in your HotEnd, as it’s what causes the molten filament to actually extrude from the print-head (crucial to 3D printing!).The friction of filament sliding its way from the filament drive to the HotEnd saps away some of this force, leaving less force to create useful pressure. When we use a bowden system the filament has to travel on a longer and more convoluted path, and so we get higher losses to friction. While standard PTFE is slippery enough to mitigate this effect, it does not eliminate it.
Another error source in extrusion systems is the compression/buckling of the filament. As we apply pressure to the filament in order to extrude it will bend a little (but a little is all it takes) between the extruder drive wheel and the HotEnd melt zone. Because of this spring-like compression we can advance the filament by 1mm at the drive wheels, but 1mm’s worth of filament will not immediately exit the nozzle in perfect synchronicity. In a bowden system this filament-spring is “softer” due to its much increased-length. The subsequent deformation under force results in extruder motor speed changes taking longer to be reflected at the nozzle, and the errors being greater in magnitude.
Capricorn XS bowden tubing helps with both of these issues. It is made of pure PTFE that has been treated with a special additive to reduce friction. It is also made to highly precise standards, with an extremely tight internal diameter to improve filament constraint between the extruder and the HotEnd.
Key Features
- Inner diameter of just 1.9mm
- Highly consistent - perfectly round
- Treated with a unique friction-reducing additive
- Capricorn™ XS branded quality
- Perfect for softer and more flexible filaments
- For use with 1.75mm filament only
