3d printing: Morale patches

TPU is one of the more difficult filaments to print, and I personally wouldn't expect an Ender 3 printer to be up to the task without significant modifications, such as a better constrained extruder, a filament dryer, and there may be a need to play around with the heated bed settings and surfaces a fair amount. I've seen a bunch of (seemingly dated) suggestions saying to just print it on blue tape that's been wiped with isopropanol, but I know it can damage coated build surfaces through extreme adhesion, but also likes to fall off if the first layer height and bed cleaning aren't on point. Try to look at highly constrained direct drive extruders, rather than bowden systems for better TPU performance, and if you do use bowden tubes at all, don't cheap out, use the low friction premium options, because TPU will drag and stretch.

In general, I know and somewhat trust MatterHackers as a brand, and their Build TPUs don't look bad. 3DXTech is my first choice for higher end filaments, and they make two hardnesses of TPU, but only in black.

The ender 3 V3 should be fine with the sprite direct drive hotend, theoretically it should be able to do all kinds of flexible filaments but YMMV. Just be aware that depending on the version you might not be able to do filaments that need hotter temps.

If you dont need too much flexibility, try looking for 90(+)A TPU, which would be easier to print yet still flexible. Anything lower is softer and a lot harder to print. If you dont need the flexibility, PETG would be fine.

(also TPU doesnt stick well by direct printing onto velcro, or maybe just the velcro i got. so might be better to just stick it after with a flexible adhesive like E6000 after.)