I’ve had my @Printrbot Simple for over a month now, and I’m still very happy with it. The XL upgrade prints great, specially after adding GT2 belts. My experience with different filaments, not so awesome.
White PLA from Printrbot: Solid material, probably the strongest stuff I have. Seems to want to print a higher temps, 210 to 215. Will jam if left on the large spool it came with and placed on the Simple Tower, but runs fine when re-spooled to the small spool that comes with the tower.
Translucent Blue PLA from some dude on ebay: The cheapest, yet oddly easiest material to work with. When spooled onto the small wood spool, prints clean every time. A little more brittle then the Printrbot filament but still quite strong.
Green PLA from “JustPLA” on Amazon. Picked it up because it was free shipping with Amazon Prime. Is the worst of the filaments I’ve used. Will jam nearly every time, even on short jobs. On the spool it’s very soft, after printing it’s super brittle. Only one thing I’ve printed with it has not cracked (A small knob)
Mustard Yellow PLA that came with the printer from Printrbot; Not great stuff, the white and blue both outperform it. Feels rough to the touch and globs up on printing a lot more, but hey it was nice of them to include it so you can get printing right away.
I have some more of the ebay filament on order to see how consistent it is, trying black this time to see how it goes
Black is OFTEN a PITA to print with…
especially CHEAP black filament, people have said to me “it’s often made from sweepings of other color filaments and is the most likely to contain contaminants.”
I have 1 spool of black ABS and 7 other colors, they all happen to work great except the black and one other color (grey).
May just be luck-of-the-draw, as using only 1 spool of filament is not a good test of quality, but so far their advice seems to hold true. Black also shows up printing imperfections more than white, so generally looks a bit worse on coarsely printed parts.
I would be interested in some cheap, easy printing, translucent blue material - do you have a link / name for this ebay guy?
Oddly I am just finishing a roll of black that I was very happy with and I have a roll of white that I just can’t get a clean surface from no matter what I do. There’s a lot of variations in filament, apparently.
@Jeffery_Myers , Yup, I’ve had similar experiences. I picked up several translucent colors from an Ebay seller that makes awesome prints, but I picked up some gold from a local shop that I just seem to struggle with whether it’s flow rate or layer adhesion…it always seem like a total pain to use.
Try baking your filament to dry it out. I understand that humidity can make filament behave poorly. If you can get it up to 120F or so for an hour or two, that ought to be sufficient. Try a small sample out to make sure it doesn’t flow or deform. After that, keep it stored in water-tight containers when you are not using it, preferably with a silica gel bag inside.
If storing in silica gel should I dry the filament first or will the silica gel help to dry it out? Missus doesn’t want me using the oven to dry plastic so I’ll have to assemble a drying unit if they won’t naturally dry out stored in a tub with silica…
I guess what I’m asking is, will the silica tub actively dry it or just keep it dry if its dry already?
If you buy filament it should already be sealed and have a descant in the packaging and dry enough to print with.
And heat cycles to dry out the filament can make your printing problematic. Gentle heat is better than an oven.
I have year old “wet” filament - any fresh stuff I’ll put straight in the tub, but will the old stuff (slowly) dry out in the tub or it’ll need some decent heat to begin drying out?
FWIW, I’ve been keeping my spools stored in individual gallon sized sealable bags with desiccant within the bags. I’ve only been printing for 6 months, but it seems to keep the material dry.
yeah I roasted a spool… In the toaster oven at work, home oven is out-of-bounds…