10 Tips for 3D printing Nylon Filament | 3D Printing Help #1

so you want to print with nylon but things aren't going as planned totally understand nylon can be extremely finicky to work with so I'm going to give you all 10 tips that I use when I try to work with it and troubleshoot my nylon prints getting a good first layer is pretty much Essential to any successful Prints but using a thicker first layer can increase that success rate significantly if you're printing with for example a 0.3 millimeter air height for the first layer only print with a 0.4 millimeter layer height and also set your printing speed for your first layer lot slower than you normally would when the filament is being laid down slowly it can really get in all the nooks and crannies on the build plate and have better adhesion to it dry your nylons thoroughly this is a very common culprit I see people suffer from because they're like there's no way it could still be wet I've dried it for 12 hours already I mean it's a very water loving filament so you're really going to have to force it to let that water go because you're going to need around 70 to 80 Celsius in order to actually get this to effectively dry and even then you're going to have to dry it for six to eight hours and if the nylon is completely saturated it can take up to 12 to 24 hours for it to actually dry out normal nylon would not be able to do this so easily because it should be slightly firm meaning when you bend it it should have some resistance if you have no resistance it's basically a wet noodle that is totally wet and you should go dry it you're gonna need a dry box for all of your nylon filaments and the reason for this is because nylon is so hygroscopic meaning that I like to absorb water from the atmosphere that if you leave it out in the open even for a few hours for a longer print it can become completely saturated and basically become unprintable your filament can literally saturate itself and become unprintable mid print but a dry box can come in many different forms it could be an actively heated dry box where it has a heating element which heats up the entire container which can also not only dry the filament but also keep it dry as well then there's another one which is more DIY friendly where it uses a bunch of desiccant which basically absorbs almost all the moisture inside of a container activated alumina it's something that I found out when I first started breeding with nylon and it was extremely effective what activated alumina is and how is it different from silica gels is that it's also a dust kit but it is a way more powerful deaths again you don't need as much but it absorbs moisture way more strongly and best of all it's completely reusable as well unfortunately you will have to heat it to 200 Celsius for it to let go of all that moisture and personally I use two filament drying systems the print dry and the IBO system the print try I initially used just to dry everything in bulk because I can fit more filaments into it and then the IBO system I print directly out of it and one of the things people getting into a mile may not realize is as you add more walls or more infill the internal stress can build up a lot I mean for example imagine a straight line of nylon right when it's really hot it's really flexible and stretchy but the moment it starts cooling down it'll start Contracting like this right but imagine if you had several nylon lines the contraction back would be much stronger so by reducing the number of walls or reducing the amount of infill you'll be able to reduce the amount of internal stress so you find just the right balancing point to not have to deal with too much warping however you shouldn't use this method just by itself as reducing too much infill or reducing too many walls can physically jeopardize the structural Integrity of your print an enclosure is required to appear with nylon if you don't have an enclosure as some manufacturers will claim that their nylon does not need an enclosure that may be true if you have some very special settings like for example low infill low wall counts it being a very small print then sure it can be printed without an enclosure most of our printing with nylon are trying to print with an engineering or functional print in mind a draft Shield what is a draft shield and how it works is pretty simple basically imagine your print is like right here in the center a draft Shield basically is printed alongside your print as it's being printed upwards making a sort of open top enclosure around your print which will hopefully protect it against straight drafts as well as another benefit that some people have claimed with draft Shields you may find that the air surrounding the immediate print itself to be warmer because the air is trapped rather than allowed to escape So in theory it should help prevent warping right kind of a mixed bag there hence reason why the controversy between whether it working or not but in my opinion a draft Shield wouldn't hurt it's an extra layer of added protection for your print having warm ambient air around your print as it's printing is really the only way to prevent warping from occurring as you're effectively ensuring that the bottom portion of the print near the print bed and the tall upper portion of the print doesn't have a temperature gradient of any kind so the whole thing is able to contract or expand equally unfortunately the temperature required to achieve this can be pretty unachievable without some sort of active heating system but when you're getting to as higher temperatures you've got to be careful about your electronics your stepper Motors really don't like being super hot temperatures like that so just simply throwing your printer inside an enclosure throwing a heater in there is probably not the best idea bad adhesion ad is I know a lot of people don't like using them but to be fully honest they have saved my butt more times than not especially when I was at my wit's end at certain points I use these two specifically nanopolymer from Vision minor as well as Magus nylon formulation or PA version but the visual matter nanopolymer has something very interesting that I've noticed not only is it cleaner to use it also seems to get stickier as the bed temperature rises which actually kind of make makes sense because this was originally formulated to be used with materials like ultim which can be printed at temperatures well above 300 Celsius and bed temperatures well above 120 Celsius and those materials have even stronger warping forces than nylon carbon fiber and glass fiber in nylon it could really help the principality of these filaments the main reason is because it's able to act as a sort of internal scaffold and resisting the internal stresses that I was talking about earlier as it tries to lift up the rigid nature of both the glass fiber and the carbon fiber helps keep it flat you might have noticed especially if you've already printed the carbon fiber filaments that you didn't notice this benefit effect what I mean by this the length of the fibers used in the carbon fiber added to the filaments directly corresponds to how much a mechanical benefit you're going to get when you print with the filament unfortunately this also means there's an increased chance of a clogging your nozzle should probably go without saying both fibers are very abrasive so you gotta need a hard nozzle and lastly even if your nylon is fresh dry it the reason why I say this is because like I said over and over again nylon loves absorbing moisture the reason why it's in a mile hour back and not in a regular plastic bag is because it will absorb moisture through the plastic bag over time so they have to use a mylar bag which is less likely to allow that water to pass through but that doesn't mean it's 100 percent not gonna let any water through so if this nylon has been sitting on a shelf for who knows how long it may have actually been saturated over that period of time so good practice would be to go ahead and dry your nylon even if it's fresh and the vacuum seal has not been broken if steam is coming out of your nozzle or if you hear a crackling noise your filament is absolutely wet but if you see a lot of stringing or just some very weird Extrusion it honestly could just be that your filament is wet because more times than not that's usually the reason why people have issues with nylon so those are my 10 tips that I typically use when I try to troubleshoot and deal with nylon issues and hopefully it'll also be helpful for y'all so let's spread it

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Length: 6min 48sec (408 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2023