Debugging bad PETG prints that are messy and cluttery everywhere
I've had problems with PETG pretty much all the time I've used it, but I recently wanted to try again as I'd been wanting to use transparent filament. I had just pulled this spool after a while of just being in a box, no desiccant or any special methods of storing, and I do live in a very humid area, so I decided to run it through a filament heater. I ran it for 50C degrees for 6 hours as a standard on the heater, and I thought this would fix it up enough.
However, when I tried to run a job, I ran into some problems. The first layer was more or less alright, shown below:
The next couple of layers were chaos though:
Is this really moisture? If so, what should I do? Is the entire spool destroyed just because I left it for about a month? Any help is appreciated. Thanks so much!
Filament
This is either too low of a Z, partial jam, or moist filament. Put this spool in a drier. I use a food dehydrator.
Try printing again with PLA but do a good purge first. What happened?
Lastly: Did you redo your z offset for the PETG? Often the first layer calibration can be slightly different for PETG?
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Chuck H
3D Printer Review Blog
more filament
yeah so like I said I did use a filament dryer, and it's been going for a long time (I've set it to another 6 hours). I'm not sure how long exactly I can leave it out as I don't really know how to store filament, but I started the print within about a couple hours of taking it out of the dryer after its been sitting for 6 hours. regarding the z offset, I am at -2mm although like I said the first layer seems to be pretty nice.
for it being a partial clog, the filament seems to be purging directly down, which makes me believe it's not partially clogged. PLA seems to be performing really well and this problem has only been with PETG.
continued because forum deleted my edit because expired
I've been told the z offset is a bit messed up, although people have said mostly in the [too high] direction. this was with mostly PLA though, and I've never had any problems with printing PLA (good quality filament at least). it is at -2mm though, so it might be a bit too low but in my experience even a little liftoff has caused the filament not to stick well enough. this makes me think it's definitely a moisture problem, but it feels like I'd have to heat it for a couple more years to have any lasting difference as 6 hours doesn't seem to help it much...
Z-offset too high
I would also wager for too high Z-offset. In the first picture printed filament in first layer does not seem to fuse together as it should, and on the second picture mess is resulted as the first layer rips of the work sheets when the next layer is printed.