I have been using PLA+ from here for a long time, and it has been excellent. I just received a few rolls of PLA+ with new labels, and the print quality is terrible. I had just finished a print with a different roll of filament and it turned out great, so I suspected the issue was the new filament. Sure enough, I swap out mid print for a near empty roll of old label PLA+ and the print was fine. You can clearly see in the pictures here where I changed filaments.
I ordered a dryer to give that a try. From everything I see, it looks exactly like what you would expect of wet filament, but I don’t have any experience with that. I’ve used a lot of filament over the years, and this is the first I’ve seen this so bad.
I agree it looks like it was wet. Not sure why one roll would be good, and the next bad, from the same company. Some brands of filament I buy I put in the dryer before I even try it, because their filament usually comes wet. Looking at you, Ninjatek.
The good silver PLA+ was from a year ago. I just picked up 4 rolls of the same silver, and 2 of 4 are giving me bad prints. The other two are still untested and sealed, but all from the same batch.
The Black PLA+ from the same order was perfect.
You can see the bubbles form right from the nozzle, so it does seem like its wet. https://youtube.com/shorts/123fBzghzc4
I have a ticket open, so we should figure this out soon.
It appears the filament is VERY wet. Every day of drying I see improvement, but even after 3 days there are still bubbles. Also all 4 rolls of PLA+ Silver are the same, so there is definitely a problem.
Some quantity of moisture is not only normal, but necessary in filament. Without the moisture it will be too dry and will become incredibly brittle. What I am seeing in the pictures/ videos you have sent now looks like a perfectly normal and healthy spool of filament!!!
Interesting, my experience with wet pla is that when it is very wet, it becomes brittle, in fact, that is what I usually do as a quick and dirty test to see if the filament is wet - bend it an half and if it snaps like dry spaghetti, it is too wet!
Yes it goes both ways, too wet and it will snap, too dry and it will also snap. You just have to get that goldilocks zone of moisture! Its always interesting to me how that can happen
I had the same experience with a batch of silver petg. It came wet and had those exact same blobs through out the print. It took 5x longer than usual to dry it to a point where the blobs were almost gone (I never got it perfect),
I suspected it had something to do with the sparkly shiny pigment used to give it the silver sheen; that pigment might clump together when the filament got too wet - just guessing .
Thanks for the feedback everyone! I’ve been printing almost 10 years now, but wet filament is something I’m only just starting to learn about.
What I found strange was I have been buying this same filament for awhile and had no issues at all. It was just this latest purchase that was giving me trouble.
I took a risk and turned up the heat on the dryer to 60deg, and the bubbles are now barely visible at all.
I also noticed that the problem is a lot worse using a 0.6mm nozzle. It only took 2 days of drying to eliminate the bubbles on a 4mm nozzle.
As for what caused the issue with the material, it could be a ton of different factors. I know that this filament comes out of BC so it is possible that it was extra humid there during the production of the filament. We will probably never know for sure, but I am happy that we figured it all out!
