Help w silk silver filament please?  

RE: Help w silk silver filament please?

Silks are usually more finicky.  I havent used the brand you mentioned but have printed a lot of other silk silver from MKOEM.  On my setup I have to print it at 230 to get decent results (but Im running a nozzle x so print temps are 5 degrees higher anyway normally for me).  My print speeds for that are 45 for perimeters, 25 for small perimeters and external perimeters.  Infill is set to 80.  

One thing to make sure of is to measure your filament and set it to match reality.  Ive got my diameter under Filament settings set to 1.7 not 1.75 as its was more accurate to the actual size.  

Everything else is set to pretty much normal for me, so cubic infill, 3 perimeters, minimum of 5 top and bottom layers at 0.2mm layer height.  

If you want to attach your project (zipped up 3mf file) I could load some silk silver in and give it a go.

RE: Help w silk silver filament please?

I haven't printed this brand but I've been through quite a few spools of red, blue, gold, copper, multi-color etc silk filament by TTYT3D. Love this stuff. The only change from the generic profile I had to make was to up the temps to 220 (first layer) and 225 the subsequent layers.

RE:

I've had good luck with the Mika3D silver silk filament, but I've found that it has a tendency to clog and unevenly extrude unless I goose the temperature a bit.

I usually override it to 225 or so.  (Same with their copper and gold.)

This is more important on my 'other' printer (Ultimaker S5) since it defaults to 200 for PLA with 190 for the first layer, but I increase on the Prusa as well.

That is the first thing I would try.

Turn up the temp on the hot end has been my experience with silk PLA's, I've not used the one you chose, but with Ziro and Eryone bands I have to go into the 225 range and they recommend 220 on the high end.

Good Luck

Swiss_Cheese

I would add also that it looks like you have some kind of weird slicer thing going on there, what slicer are you using?

Try posting larger images next time so we can see.

Regards

Swiss_Cheese

RE: Help w silk silver filament please?

Thx gang, I'm gonna write this one off as a filament issue as I had a tail end of a spool of a similar silk gold and I tried it with this model and it printed perfectly!

When I finally get home today I'll try dehydrating it and give it a go again and if it works it works and if not I'll prolly just trash it and try something else. I've got some non-silk silver PETG that should work with a similar appearance. 

I'm just tired of (pardon) f-ing around with this. I guess I'm spoiled with expecting perfect results every time. Majorly frustrating when nothing seems to work. 

Oh well, so it goes (and so do I) 🙂

RE: Help w silk silver filament please?

That looks like it!

Ran 6 hours on dehydrate and got a nice flat top with no holes. Still not perfect, knurling around the side rough but much better. 

I'll re dehydrate it overnight and through the day tomorrow to be sure. 

Humidity in here is running around 27 percent but we did have some humid spells in the summer. 

Thx again!

RE: Help w silk silver filament please?

Posted by: @annier

Ran 6 hours on dehydrate and got a nice flat top with no holes. Still not perfect, knurling around the side rough but much better. 

I'll re dehydrate it overnight and through the day tomorrow to be sure. 

Humidity in here is running around 27 percent but we did have some humid spells in the summer. 

I was going to suggest dehydration too. I had a problem in which the extruder would inexplicably jam with loud clicks. Tried all sorts of things, went back and forth with Prusa Support, bought a new heat break and thermal paste, and did a bunch of other stuff... and it turned out the problem was that silk filament. Drying it out for several hours in my convection oven on the "warm" setting (about 120°F) fixed it right up.

The only problem with oven-drying is that the filament anneals around the spool, so if I leave it inside the MMU2S feed tube for more than a day, it can't take the fatigue of being straightened out like that and it breaks. I store the spool in a drybox and I make sure it has plenty of indicator dessicant.

Another silk filament I had (a lovely metallic bronze one) got brittle when I dried it out. Not so much I couldn't print with it, though. I was glad when I finally used up that spool.

RE: Help w silk silver filament please?

Posted by: @fuchsr

I haven't printed this brand but I've been through quite a few spools of red, blue, gold, copper, multi-color etc silk filament by TTYT3D. Love this stuff. The only change from the generic profile I had to make was to up the temps to 220 (first layer) and 225 the subsequent layers.

Hm. A few minutes before I saw this, I had just posted about a problem with the perimeter pulling away from the part. I had raised my temp to 215 but was concerned about going higher, fearing that I'd have a stringing problem or cooked filament in my nozzle. OK, you've given me the confidence to try 225.

RE: Help w silk silver filament please?

Posted by: @anachronist

 The only problem with oven-drying is that the filament anneals around the spool, so if I leave it inside the MMU2S feed tube for more than a day, it can't take the fatigue of being straightened out like that and it breaks. I store the spool in a drybox and I make sure it has plenty of indicator dessicant.

During the height of the pandemic we got one of those Ninja Cookers as a general-purpose kitchen tool/toy.

It has a dehydrate mode, and when the inner basket is taken out it nicely fits a 1kg spool and I've used it on occasion to dry filament that I suspected was wet.

It has a nice 'gentle' 105F (~40C) dehydrate setting and an internal fan to circulate the warm air.  I've had good luck dehydrating filament overnight at that setting EXCEPT in one case.

A while back I found a partial spool of the FilamentPM silver-gray PLA that appears to be the same product that Prusa (used to?) include with new printers.  It was what was left over when I manually (and very awkwardly) re-spooled it from a huge honking 2kg spool onto two regular spools, and the remnant (for some reason) just sat in the corner of the spare bedroom for over a year, exposed to room air.

It was extremely brittle and would not even load into the machine (with the MMU disconnected) without breaking.

I tried a few cycles of dehydrate with no luck, and it still broke immediately when loading.

Close inspection (look closely at the photo below) showed numerous hairline cracks which I did not notice at first.  The filament was obviously unusable.

That's really the only filament that I have not been able to get to work in this machine.

I'm not really sure whether it was the long room air exposure or the multiple dehydrate cycles that caused the cracking or made it worse, but the effect was the same, immediate breakage when loading.

RE:

@jsw - that is indeed strange. Good thing you didn't have much of it left.

One thing I have noticed with my oven-dried filaments is that they stay nice and flexible inside my rewinder dryboxes, but the part that's in the MMU tube gets very brittle after a couple of days. This didn't happen before I baked them. My problem with moisture contamination before baking wasn't brittleness, but jamming. Apparently the moisture would cause swelling and blockage in the hotend. Baking my spools fixed that problem, but introduced brittleness.