3d Printing PETG For Beginners! Great For Functional Parts

just about every person i know that's gotten into 3d printing over the past few years has started out with pla which makes a ton of sense pla is a great material it's awesome for experimenting with and learning the basics of 3d printing and to this day if my project doesn't need things like more heat resistance or more impact resistance then pla is the material that i usually default to for anyone that does go into other materials i would argue the second most common material that's 3d printed today is petg and seems to sort of be the next step in the natural progression for most people in their 3d printing journey petg is a great material with a lot of unique properties that make it perfect for functional applications in circumstances where pla just won't suffice there is a reason that all of the prusa mk3 machines as well as their prusa mini is made out of petg and not pla although petg is definitely a less demanding material to print with than something like nylon or polycarbonate there are some additional things to consider when going from that if you're used to printing with pla and i'm currently working on a project that requires me to print out roughly three kilograms of petg parts so i figured what better time than now to cover this material so today's video will be all about petg we'll talk about the material and how it's actually used in the real world we'll talk about why you may want to 3d print with it what the requirements are both on the hardware as well as the slicer side of things and of course we'll do some 3d printing so with all that being said and without further ado let's get right into today's video [Music] starting off let's talk a bit about the material and its properties polyethylene terethalate glycol or petg as it's more commonly called is often used in manufacturing it's commonly found in both the medical industry and it's often used for food packaging although ptg is typically considered food safe in traditional manufacturing that is not the case with 3d printing the primary reason for that is just the way that 3d prints are formed which is a layer on top of a layer even if those layers are really fine they are a perfect avenue for bacteria to become trapped and the only way you'd really be able to have a 3d printed part to be considered food safe would be to make sure that your hardware is food safe and you would need to coat that printed part with something like a food safe epoxy if you're interested in food safe 3d printing i highly recommend that you do some additional research because there is quite a bit involved with that petg has great impact resistance chemical resistance and is fully recyclable most common water bottles are made out of pet which is a p-e-t-g without a glycol modifier hackaday has a really awesome article on p-e-t and p-e-t-g if you really want to get down to the chemical science that i can link you to in the description of this video although there are both p-e-t and petg filaments that are available to print with petg is going to be much more common and much more popular pet is typically a bit stiffer meaning it's not going to have the same level of impact resistance that petg has some reasons to print with ptg over pla is for its added impact resistance thanks to its little bit of flex it's added heat resistance it's uv resistance that it has built into it it's chemical resistance and the fact that petg generally speaking is going to be a more translucent material if you look at raw pla pellets and you look at raw petg pellets the raw petg or natural pellets are a much more translucent tone than that of pla with me living in southern california on a hot summer day if i have a pla part that has been printed and it is sitting in my car it is very possible that that part will warp which is not the case with petg also if i was going to be printing something that was going to be more outside than inside ideally i would go with asa which we've covered on this channel but between pla and petg petg is also going to be a better option i'll have a tds for both pla and ptg in the description of this video if you want to compare and contrast the results of the different tests now that we've talked a bit about petg as a material and some of the reasons why you might want to 3d print with it let's go over the hardware requirements to print with this material i recently built the prusa mk3s plus over on the modbod army channel during a live stream and as part of my testing i'm going to be printing the three kilograms of petg through this machine so that's what we're going to use in today's video with that being said don't worry because most of the 3d printing i've done with petg over the years has been on machines like the ender 3 and you definitely do not need something like the prusa printer to be able to print with this material starting off with the hot end the mk 3s plus comes with an all metal e3d v6 which is a fairly common hot end that's capable of hitting roughly 300 celsius now most filament manufacturers that i've seen will provide a pretty broad range of temperatures that their filament can be printed with and for petg the most common range i've seen is on the low end roughly 230 celsius to on the high end 250 to 255 celsius the sweet spot i've found for printing with petg filament over the years has been between 240 to 245 celsius now the good news is is that it technically means you don't need an all metal hotend to print with this material however i highly recommend you getting one if you plan on doing a lot of printing with petg not all metal hot ends like what comes stock on the ender 3 has a teflon or ptfe lining that goes all the way through the hot end down to the nozzle and that will start to degrade very heavily at around 250 celsius and can even start to degrade below that and all it takes is that you have a slight bit of deviation between what the hot end is outputting and what your thermistor is reading to have that happen and the teflon when it does melt it is quite toxic so my recommendation is this if you're planning on doing an occasional petg print then you're probably okay as long as you stick to the lower end of the scale to run it on a non-all metal hotend however if you know that you're going to be printing a lot of ptg and that's something you're interested in i highly recommend doing the upgrade not only for not damaging your hot end but also for your safety and on something like the ender 3 we've covered the micro swiss hot end which is a drop in replacement so it doesn't take very long and then you don't have to worry about the ptfe lining in your hot end petg is sort of known to be one of the materials that likes to goop up around your hot end that's kind of the only way i can describe it is like a goop or a blob and i am a firm believer that just about every hot end should have a silicone sock on there the silicone stock will do a couple of things one it will help to insulate your hot end two it'll keep any of the strings that are caused by the petg being extruded to keep off of your hot end and in the worst case scenario that you have a really bad failure the silicone sock sort of acts as a shield between your printed part that's failed and your thermistor and your heater cartridge because if you get a lot of petg up around the hot end it is going to be very difficult to save the hot end or at least that thermistor and heater cartridge so silicone socks are super cheap most common hot ends will have them already but if you do not i highly recommend getting one for the nozzle you don't need anything special and a standard brass nozzle will work fine unless of course you are using something that's like a carbon based petg or a glass ptg or something like a glow in the dark then you will of course want a wear resistant nozzle with that being said the petg again back to the gloopiness does seem to really like to stick to brass nozzles so if you are running into issues and you seem to have a problem with the ptg building up around your nozzle i would definitely look into something like a coated nozzle there are nickel plated or nickel coated nozzles that are much less likely to have the petg stick to them they're quite inexpensive and they can really really help out the mk3s plus has a dual gear direct drive extruder and that is not a requirement to print with ptg i've used the stock single geared plastic creality extruder that comes on a lot of their machines like the ender 3 and printed this material fine however the better extruder you have whether it's a direct drive or a bowden is going to give you much more consistency in your extrusions and because ptg typically is is a bit stringier of a material than pla it's going to be much easier to dial in your settings using a direct drive setup versus a bowden but if you are using a bowden setup that's absolutely fine i would just recommend printing some sort of retraction test beforehand so that way you can figure out the sweet spot before doing a big print and running into all sorts of stringing issues for the bed you will need a heated bed which luckily has become a standard that wasn't always the case my temperature or sweet spot for printing with petg is 70 celsius and my favorite bed surface for printing with petg is powder coated pei now the proof show that i have here came with a smooth pei sheet which both smooth pei and build tack will stick very well to petg but they will stick too well to petg i've seen on multiple occasions where someone's printed on direct build tack with petg or on a smooth pei and then when they go to remove their print part of the sheet is stuck in the bottom of their petg print so what i recommend doing is taking a bit of glue stick and the glue stick is actually not to help the petg stick it's a barrier between your build surface and the petg so on glass i typically use a bit of glue stick i have powder coated pei sheets on most of my printers that i'm doing a lot of printing with because it's just my go-to but again if you've got a standard build tack or kind of what the creality machines come with a lot of them is a knockoff build tack or smooth pei be sure to put something down like glue stick otherwise you will run the risk of damaging your bed surface good news is unlike abs you do not need to have an enclosure to print with ptg and i would say that 90 or more of my ptg printing over the years has been done on open format machines one big difference between pla and petg is the hygroscopic nature of petg i don't think i've ever had real issues with pla that i've left open for long periods of time other than that maybe it becomes a bit more brittle which baking that out will usually resolve that while ptg i've had a lot of issues with moisture and it seems to have just gotten worse over the years so i would say if you're serious about printing with petg or really just if you're serious about 3d printing other than pla you should have some sort of a drying solution i know some people use their oven some people use dehydrators that they sort of makeshift i covered a couple options a few months ago at this point i think one was around fifty dollars one was around a hundred and twenty ish dollars give or take and i can link you in the description down to those but i recommend regardless whether it's a new ptg whether it's an open petg that you at least dry it to make sure you're starting from a dry state because wet ptg is not going to look good it's going to be much more stringier and it doesn't matter how good your hardware is or how dialed in it is if you have wet filament it's just not going to turn out good and for anyone that's wondering my recommendation is i dry out ptg at around 65 celsius for at least two hours before printing with a spool that i haven't used in a long time now that we've covered the hardware side of things let's hop over to the slicer there's actually not a whole lot to cover on the slicer side that we didn't already go over but i always recommend starting off with the built-in default profile for whatever material you're using regardless of the slicer so in prusa slicer i'm starting off with the generic ptg profile which will get us pretty close to where we want to be i am going to change the nozzle temperatures from the 230 and 240 to just the solid 245 i said that i print between 240 and 245 but typically i like to opt on the hotter side so that way i can push a bit more material as long as there's no issues with stringing and then as far as the bed temp goes they've got it set to the first layer of 85 and the other layers at 90 which is a bit odd to me so i'm going to have the first layer be a bit warmer to just help with some of that initial adhesion and then after that i will switch to the 70 celsius which is what i typically run i do typically run a layer cooling fan with ptg my normal percent is 50 percent for the fan speed pressure sizer had it built in at a range from minimum of 30 fan speed with a maximum of 50 percent and that seems to be working out pretty well for me but back when i was using cura i would just set the fan speed off for the first three layers and then 50 fan speed for the rest of the print for all this settings like the layer height and the perimeters it's going to be completely up to what you're printing and the strength that you want for this the part calls for a 0.25 layer height with three perimeters and three top and solid bottom layers so i'm gonna enter those in but again this is just specific to whatever it is that you're printing if you're printing something that's more um you know for display than function then you can go with maybe you want finer layer lines or maybe you want less or more shells and then for infill the default that it had on here was 20 percent the in stars for some reason i'm changing that to grid i don't print with stars i think it's a pretty infill but uh grid's kind of my go-to that or typically gyroid and then for the infill 20 is also what mine called for it's completely up to you depending on how solid you want your part to be i did cover this in a previous video but i always run skirts on every single print i don't care the material this just allows me to verify that the uh bed is still even or or leveled as it needs to be so three loops is typically what i recommend and then as far as the brim goes i've never used a brim with ptg because i don't usually have warping problems which is a bit ironic because as you'll see here in a moment i did end up having a warping problem with this particular print because i picked a very odd print for this video but normally you don't need a brim for printing with petg speed wise the defaults and pressure slicer should be fine i think that 80 percent or 80 millimeters per second for the infill is a little bit aggressive if you don't have your material dialed in because i've been printing with these settings on the prusa i know that it's completely capable of running it at that but i always recommend starting off with slower speeds if you're running into problems you can always ramp that up later as you gain some success and familiarity but again if you want to start with the default speeds that's fine but going slower is never going to hurt you so as i mentioned a moment ago i did end up having to use a brim with this print i started the print off and maybe an hour into it i saw that the corners were lifting and taking the advice of my recent video where i was having an issue with the printer that ended up being the g-code i did take this file and look at the g-code after seeing some kind of interesting things on the bottom layer and the thing i did not realize initially was just how uh little surface area there was on the bottom layer and there was a few areas as you can see here where it was sliced and there just wasn't really any extrusion so i did go ahead and add a brim for this particular print which just allowed me to get proper adhesion and have the print uh print successfully and then after this print i turned the brim back off and i've since printed probably another four or five different very large petg parts that just didn't need it every print there's a little bit of uh analyzing it and seeing hey is there anything unique that's needed does it need supports does it need this brim so the settings although they will get you 95 of the way there there's always the five percent that you'll have to just consider and analyze depending on the parts geometries i hope that you guys enjoyed this video and if you've been considering printing with petg and you follow the steps outlined in this video i can guarantee you you'll be much better off than just going in blind to a new material i would love to know in the comments down below anybody that has been printing with ptg if there's anything new that you learned in this video or if there's something that i just didn't touch on that you've seen or that you've learned from printing with petg that you think might be useful to someone that is looking to print with this material or somebody that's maybe been trying to print with this material but has been unsuccessful so far or just having really mixed results on that note don't forget to like and subscribe for more great videos we make a video every single week so there's always fresh content coming your way and if you do want to support the channel furthermore i'll place links down below in the description over to our patreon where there are some really awesome rewards huge thank you to all of our existing patreon supporters i appreciate each and every one of you allowing me to come back every single week and spend more time doing what i love which is making content for you all to enjoy on that note this has been daniel from modbot and i look forward to seeing you guys in my next video these guys

Channel: ModBot

Views: 272,987

Keywords: petg, petg filament, how to print with petg, pet-g, best settings for petg, best printer for petg, petg ender 3, petg adhesion

Id: TEAD8yKPEkc

Length: 16min 36sec (996 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 29 2022