Nozzles, hotends and build plates

A nozzle costs less than a spool of filament and a build plate costs less than a failed weekend. Between them they cause most of the print faults people blame on the machine, and replacing the right one at the right time is the highest-return spending on this entire site.

Two questions settle almost everything in this section: what material are you running, and is your bottom surface a show face?

Hardened steel: who actually needs it

You need a hardened nozzle if you print anything abrasive. That means carbon-fiber-filled and glass-fiber-filled filament, metal-filled, wood-filled, and — the one that surprises people — glow-in-the-dark and some silk and marble PLAs. The glow pigment is strontium aluminate, which is genuinely hard, and glitter is glass. Those materials wear a stainless nozzle fast; with the worst of them a single print can do visible damage.

You do not need it for plain PLA, PETG, ABS, ASA or TPU. A stainless nozzle will run those for years. Buying hardened steel for a PLA-only workflow costs you a slight thermal-conductivity penalty for no benefit, which is a small loss but a real one.

The full material-by-material answer is on do I need a hardened nozzle, which covers the ten or so variants of that question in one place. If you want the hardness numbers, hardened steel is cited at HRA 74 and the tungsten carbide nozzle on the H2D Pro at HRA 90 — see hardened vs stainless.

Nozzle size matters more than nozzle material for most people

Most owners run 0.4 mm forever and that is a defensible default. The two reasons to change are specific:

• 0.6 mm for carbon-fiber filament and for functional parts where layer lines do not matter. The wider bore is the actual fix for chopped-fiber clogging, not just a speed increase. Hardened steel plus 0.6 mm is the standard combination for CF.
• 0.2 mm for miniatures and fine mechanical detail, at a large cost in print time and a real increase in clog risk.

The practical obstacle on a P1S is that changing nozzle means changing the hotend, which is enough friction that most people never do it. That is why a quick-change hotend is one of the better upgrades in the whole catalog — it turns nozzle diameter into a per-print decision. Nozzle sizes in detail.

Build plates: texture is a finish decision, not a quality one

Textured PEI is the right default for almost everything. It grips hard without glue, releases when cool, and it is forgiving about a slightly imperfect Z offset — which means fewer failed first layers. The trade is that its texture transfers to the bottom face of every print.

Smooth PEI gives a glossy bottom face and is noticeably less forgiving: Z offset and surface cleanliness both have to be right. A dual-texture plate gets you both surfaces on one sheet, which is the sensible purchase if some of your prints are display pieces. The plate roundup covers which to buy; textured vs smooth covers which to use.

Clogs, and when a nozzle is actually dead

A clog is a symptom, not a diagnosis. The cause is usually moisture (wet filament steams and carbonizes in the hotend), a heat creep problem, or debris from a previous material with a much higher print temperature. Replacing the nozzle without fixing the cause gets you a second clog.

The honest test for a worn nozzle: a rounded, widened tip prints lines wider than they should be and loses detail everywhere at once, rather than failing intermittently. Intermittent is a clog or a feed problem; uniformly poor is wear. Clog procedure and how long a nozzle lasts.

Where to start

Buying: best nozzles or best build plates. Fixing something right now: clogged nozzle or print not sticking. Working out what a new filament needs: the hardened-nozzle question.