As far as I can tell, moisture does nothing to it. I can only speak from experience, but it is about 10 years of experience, so maybe it’s not useless. for each new roll, i try to buy a new color (to roughly date my creations), and i hope that doesn’t eventually give me a bad experience :) and i kind of fear that even within a brand, some colors are better than others and there’s no way for me to know. So i don’t know if formfutura’s easyfil has magic proprietary ingredients? i kind of think all dyed PLA has better material properties for most purposes than the clear stuff? or, for all i know, that undyed PLA was actually fine filament that had just seen an extremely bad storage situation at some point in its history?īut i’m convinced not all PLA is created equal. but i think i would notice if it was popping and sizzling at the nozzle and it isn’t. of course, i wouldn’t notice new stringing because i use a bowden extruder with a long (800mm) teflon tube, i get a ton of stringing anyways. i have no idea if that’s changed the quality of that filament though.īut then i bought some formfutura easyfil PLA and it has never done anything at all brittle to me, and the desiccant hasn’t needed to be refreshed in years, and i can leave bunches of it naked on the printer in my humid basement for months without problem. i bought a rubbermaid box to keep filament in, and put that color change silica desiccant in there, and it absorbed a bunch of moisture from it right away. i had the filament break before printing a couple times.
everything i printed with it turned out brittle. When i ordered my printer, i got the undyed (“clear”) PLA. There are a lot of variables with PLA that i fear are poorly understood. Posted in 3d Printer hacks Tagged 3d printing, drying, stringing, test, water Post navigation Need a filament dryer ready-made? Why not use an off the shelf food dehydrator? In conclusion, it would seem that PLA is pretty much fine just kicking around on your desk, whilst you do need to take a little drying care with ASA and PET-G.
He summises this is due to the filament spending more time in the hotend, allowing the water to boil off for longer, and impact the print a little more.įilament to filament performance seems to indicate that PLA was the least affected, whilst PET-G was the most affected. Specially, noticed that the areas of the model where the extruder needs to slow down, the print quality worsens. Visually speaking, the good old benchy is a great test model, it has lot of features for evaluating print quality, in one cute little model. It was interesting to note that water absorption doesn’t seem to affect the strength of the final part. It would seem that the most obvious print defect that occurs with increased water absorption is that of stringing, and other than being annoying and reducing surface quality somewhat, it’s not all that serious in the grand scheme of things. What followed was a whole lot of printing, but they all did print.ĭifferent filaments will absorb water at different rates, depending upon their chemical composition and the environment, nylon being apparently particularly fond of a good soaking.
He stored the samples in three environments, on his desk, outside in the garden, and finally submerged in water for a full week. setup a simple experiment, using samples of three common types of filament, specifically PLA, PET-G and ASA. Some others have ‘never had a problem.’ So it’s about time someone in the know has done some testing to try to pin down the answer to the question we’re all asking How bad is wet filament really? Some people are absolutely convinced you must bake filament if it been stored outside an airtight bag, even for a few days. There’s a lot of opinions and theories around the storing and drying of 3D printing materials.