Anyone printing Polymaker PA6-CF? Annealing tips?
I've been experimenting with Polymaker's PA6-CF filament, and after calibration and tuning, I was able to print a near-perfect Benchy on my Sovol SV06+ with little trouble.
I figured I'd try annealing it, which I hadn't done for any of my other test prints. Polymaker recommends 80°C for 6 hours, and after researching a bit, I found the preferred methods to be:
"Dry" annealing in an oven, food dehydrator, etc., and then moisture conditioning the part by allowing it to absorb moisture from the air for a few days "Wet" annealing in water with a sous vide machine, then allowing it to naturally dry in ambient air for a few days
I tried the wet method because my oven's temperatures vary quite a bit at temps as low as 80°C. My method, albeit a bit crude compared to a sous vide machine, involved filling a pot with distilled water, sticking a temp probe in it, and using an electric stove to slowly heat the water to 80°C. At that point, I turned down the stove to just barely be capable of maintaining that 80°C and let it sit for 6 hours, checking the temp every so often. After 6 hours, I just turned the stove off and let it cool down overnight before removing the part.
After a day or so of drying, a lot of white limescale-like deposits started showing up all over the part (see below pic). My first thought was that it looked just like hard water deposits, but I'm not sure where it could have come from since I used distilled water specifically to avoid hard water deposits from tap water. It definitely happened during the annealing process because the part looked perfectly clean off the printer. Has anyone else run into a similar problem when using the wet annealing method? How did you solve it?
I'm not opposed to dry annealing instead since I plan on getting a cheap food dehydrator to reliably dry the filament spool anyway, but I'm unsure how effective moisture conditioning with ambient air will be.