Spool snarl ruins print midway through. How to prevent this?
I was printing replacement parts for my Prusa i3 MK3S printer using a spool of Prusament PETG, and everythign was going fine. About an hour into the print, I walk in on it to find a disaster in progress, with a snarl effectively preventing the filament from being fed into the extruder. I'm using the stock spool holder that comes with the kit. The spool was used successfully for a print just earlier in the morning, and nothing was moved before initiating this print. This seems entirely random, but maybe there is a way I can prevent this?
RE: Spool snarl ruins print midway through. How to prevent this?
A tangled spool has two causes.
1. It came from the factory that way. Highly unlikely since spools are machine-wound and can't be tangled unless someone goes out of their way to do so.
2. The user is careless with the bitter end of the filament and it is passed over or under at least one other turn on the spool.
To prevent it, each time you unpack a new spool or unload a spool from the machine, take pains to watch that bitter end and always secure it. You can pass it through one of the handy holes in the spool, holding it in place. That's what I do.
You can also print any of about 100,000,000,000,000 variations of a filament clip, which will work on some brands of spools but not on all, and will most likely fall off the spool or not grip the filament enough to securely hold it.