Filament (brands) for the MMU 2  

Re: Filament (brands) for the MMU 2

I’ve heard several times that the mmu 2 unit works great with certain filament brands and not so well with others. It seems to be even color dependent. And some brands don’t seem to work very well at all even after a lot of ramming sequence tweaking.

That sounds like a list would make sense to help people choose the right filament brands for the mmu 2.

As far as I know these brands/materials work great with the mmu2: Colorfabbs PLA/PHA (all colors), Prusament PLA (all colors), DAS FILAMENT PLA (all colors).

So far I've been able to get every filament I tried to work after some tweaking of the settings. Others have not been so lucky.

One of the challenges with the MMU is that there are so many new variables involved that if someone reports problems with a particular filament it's hard to know if it's really a problem with the filament or a problem with something else. For example, I've had no problems with Inland PLA since day one, but another user here on the forum has had no end of difficulty getting it to work. Why the difference? I have no clue.

So I'm hesitant to say that a particular filament does or does not work, because I don't feel confident attributing my success or failure to the filament as opposed to some other (possibly unknown) variable.

Re: Filament (brands) for the MMU 2

In two weeks, I have done major experimentation with 5 colors of Matterhackers Build filament (their cheap line). Not one successful print (although I have one small sheep with many load/unload issues, but only a single missing layer under the chin.

I'm now trying two completely fresh rolls of inland PLA (black and white, I'm going to get that sheep if it kills me!). I'm trying it with stock PLA settings except drop the temp to 205/200, and my own gcode hacking to drop to 195 during unload. I'll tell you in a few hours

I've got two rolls of Matterhacker "pro" filament (yes, black/white) on order. I've also got 4 rolls of Prusament on order, but they said it would ship in a week 10 days ago and I've heard nothing. I'll report back on all three filaments as I go.

Re: Filament (brands) for the MMU 2

Inland black and white work well for me. 205/200C, dropping to 195 during RAM. Stock 'generic PLA' load/unload/RAM settings.

Re: Filament (brands) for the MMU 2

Someone mentioned on facebook that Colorfabbs nGen works well with PLA ramming settings. I was surprised since nGen has a higher tendency of stringing than PLA. But he said that the tips looked exactly as the PLA ones.

Re: Filament (brands) for the MMU 2

I had 3 kinds of junk filament and they made my other trouble shooting more difficult. Thankfully I had precious inches of plain prusa PLA left which I use as a standard.

Anyway, I swapped in 4 rolls of Tianse PLA (the same brand that has a disastrous metal filled $12 bronze which caused endless jams) for about $15/kg in red/white/blue/fl-yellow and they'd been totally fine for how cheap it is. The stuff is wavy and not high end by any means, but it's better with strings than the stuff I was using before.

I have some Priline black I'm happy with as well.

Re: Filament (brands) for the MMU 2

I had great success with Colorfabbs PLA/PHA. However, the stock PLA settings didn't work. I had to use the following settings (that are floating around in facebook and this forum). It was very surprising to me that the stock settings didn't work because PHA makes the PLA less stringy an should therefore be better for the mmu 2 unit than some cheap PLA.

Re: Filament (brands) for the MMU 2

There's some unreasonableness in the speeds and accelerations, which I feel make tuning the ramming difficult. I believe we're in a situation where asking for 50 mm/s gets it, asking for 60 gets 60, but asking for 100 gets 30 because the system can't keep up.

The strings that cause me problems aren't big thick things, it's spider-silk wisps which eventually ball up and get jammed on the end of the next filament to feed.

Still PET gives me the worst tips, TPU has the most jams. I can print all three (with PLA) together but it's not what I'd call reliable yet.

Re: Filament (brands) for the MMU 2

Makergeeks regular PLA. 225C first layer, 220C rest. With default Slic3r settings work great for me.

Re: Filament (brands) for the MMU 2

Someone mentioned on facebook that Colorfabbs nGen works well with PLA ramming settings. I was surprised since nGen has a higher tendency of stringing than PLA. But he said that the tips looked exactly as the PLA ones.

Do you have a link to the nGen posting you refer to?
I also experience stringing tips and am looking for settings that work well.

Re: Filament (brands) for the MMU 2

i'm using all Hatchbox PLA brand on mine.

the default prusa PLA settings at 215C/205C have worked well except for Yellow.

Yellow has been stringing worse then the others and cause 2 prints to fail because the selector was full of yellow cotton candy strings.

in general on the hatchbox all the PLA is stringing more then i would like but the FINDA is apparently dealing with it.

i used the some inland PLA settings from flaviu.i and i dropped the temp just on yellow to 200C

the MK3 itself causes some problems with under-extrusion so i'm working out those issues by slowing down the speeds on infills from 200 down to 100 and perimeters and slowing the first layer to 10mms. i do not want to alter the extrusion multiplier or ext widths, i did change the first layer from .42 to .45 like all the other layers to help with the mk3s issues.

my hatchbox has not been stored correctly so i would like to see if there is a positive effect from Baking my PLA to remove all the water it has collected and some of the brittleness that occurs, water removal could remove the strings but i need time to test and see.