Hey there all, been a while.

3D Printing
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Hey there all, been a while. I stopped printing for a few months for various reasons. I just joined TechShop in San Francisco and will be running my 2 prototype deltas from there.

My filament… I left some of it out unsealed, 5-7 months out of the factory packaging, with quite a bit of rain where I live.

With the PLA some has actually snapped into several curved segments on sections that were previously leading into the extruder on one printer I left sitting for 4 months. Do I need to recycle old PLA or should I test print and see how it is? is it going to be so variable along the filament left on the spool that it’s not worth the hassle? 2 other spools were left out as well, not extended in tension so no snapped material but it makes me wonder what they will be like to print. (red and black Hatchbox pla, and clear Solutech pla to be specific). None are more than half a spool remaining.

I left my Taulman 910 out, oops. guess I will just try to use that since it’s the smaller spool type. I will try to dry it first.

I left some PETG out as well, any advice on what to expect or how to dry that out is appreciated as well. Orange and white if it matters. The white, I may just chuck it (in the recycling) white filament of all types seems to hate me. But the orange (esun) is nice material, and it is a brand new spool so i would like to salvage that if possible.

Advice appreciated, I forgot a bit of details on filament while dealing with some other things in life the last few months. I am looking at it all thinking ‘which one liked 198 and which one preferred 203 again?’ hopefully diving back into the profiles and process in my S3D install will help remind me of some of the materials technical details…

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Done all of these for longer time frames. The PETG has been perfectly fine. No snapping or popping there. PLA is gonna be your nemesis I think as the brittleness can be hard to gauge. I’ve had spools like that where they were fine to print, and others that snapped if you left them in the machine under tension for ten minutes. As for the nylon, bake it! Should dry out the moisture. It’s a pain with its hydroscopic nature but man it’s nice to print.

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Bake the nylon and store in a polypropylene drybox. (Ziplock bags are not adequate!)

Bake the PETG and store it in any sealed container with desiccant.

Ditch the PLA unless you have a high tolerance for gambling with failed prints. It might be fine, it might not, really depends on the exact PLA blend. You could try pulling off a hundred feet from each spool (~10% of a 1kg spool) to see if you can get rid of the moisture-damaged outer layer and get to good stuff underneath. But there’s no guarantee that works… PLA is a goofy polymer that does weird things as it ages.