How to 3d Print PETG Reliably and Safely

hello this is Irv Shapiro with the dr. Beck's channel on a very cold spring day here in the Midwest today we're going to talk about how to print with a filament that requires a higher temperature I've received a lot of questions on my channel about how to print PE TG now for me it's a bit of a mystery because I've been printing it with PE TG since I began 3d printing but I started printing PEP g on a Prusa i3 mk3 and the prusik eco system is relatively well tuned which is what you get for $1000 so I thought today I would attempt to print with PEP G on a monoprice ultimate - and on an a net et for a relatively low end printer in the a net printer and a mid price printer in the ultimate - so stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] now the first question we have to answer is why would you want to use PEP G instead of PLA PLA comes in many many different colors this was printed in PLA this was printed in PLA this beautiful vase was printed in PLA PLA is in fact quite strong it's one of the stronger pure filaments meaning a filament that doesn't have other things added to it it's relatively flexible if you printed thin you can actually bend it this was printed in PLA thin so why would you want to use PE TG well two reasons its characteristics under stress are different in many ways it's stronger because the adhesion of layers in PE TG is much stronger than PLA now if you remember when we 3d print we print a layer at a time this way PLA is very strong this way it's not so strong pe TG is much stronger this way between layers but the more important reason is temperature the glass transition point the point at which the plastic becomes pliable and soft not that it melts but it becomes pliable and soft of PLA is only 60 to 65 C that's about a hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit so let's say you want to print something you're going to put into your car you're going to use to hang something from your mirror put it on your dashboard if you print in PLA on a hot summer day under direct sun it will begin to droop it will begin to deform because it will reach the glass transition point the glass transition point of PE TG is anywhere from 80 to 100 degrees centigrade significantly hotter so you want to use PE TG if you want better layer adhesion and more importantly if you want to use it in a place where it needs to be able to handle more heat so I'll give you an example these are little sanding blocks this one still has the brim attached and I use them in woodworking now when you're sanding something it gets pretty hot so in fact if I was to make these out of PLA they might begin to bend under heat I use these on a wood lathe turning very very fast and so that wouldn't be a good choice PEP G works extremely well now a disadvantage of PEP G is that because layer adhesion is very good pulling off supports is much more difficult on PE TG if this was PLA these supports would come right off in this case I'll probably use an exacto knife to trim the supports off of this sanding brace so PE TG has a higher glass transition point it is stronger layer adhesion now if I want the ability to use a part in higher temperatures why not use ABS well because ABS gives off terrible harmful fumes when you print it so now let's talk about safety if you look at the slide that's on the screen right now 3d insider ran an article where they quoted a number of industry sources PLA considered safe so where does PE TG fall in the range well PLA is made from organic materials like maize and sugarcane PE TG is still a synthetic and therefore doesn't give off fumes and are they a problem in general while PE TG is considered more complex and I would always use good ventilation and I'm not giving medical advice here PE TG is generally considered safe now I did a very unscientific study of my own using a air quality meter now this air quality meter looks at particulate material meaning fine things like dust in the air it also looks at two other types of compounds the first is formaldehyde which is considered unsafe but in fact there's for another height in every home because some of the insulation near walls various plastic items give off from L died and TVO sees now I took a look at the levels here in my basement lab before I started printing and then while I was printing PE TG and let's look at this slide together so you can see on this slide that I took and I put the meter literally on top of my ultimate to monoprice ultimate to printer I opened up the top cover the ultimate two is a fully enclosed printer I wanted it to be exposed to all of the fumes and here's what I found in terms of TV OC levels these are the acceptable levels and I found this on a website from T camp t cam is a group that does consulting for industrial manufacturers to minimize fumes in their environment and they source their data from a variety of government sources and what I found was that any level less than 0.3 milligrams per meter cubed is considered low in fact less than 0.3 is absolutely acceptable and I was at point 1 1 7 so point 1 1 7 is less than 1/2 of 0.3 half of point 3 would it be point 1 5 so even at the worst reading PE TG at least the PE TG that I did this test with and that was actually hatch box PE TG did not give off more TV OC fumes than is considered absolutely safe I did the same thing with particulate matter that was considered safe and I'll link to these slides in the description below so you can see this salya safe levels of particulate matter are considered 35 micrograms per meter cubed and I was at 2 and then with formaldehyde I was at point 0 to 5 milligrams per meter cubed and in general anything below 0.12 was quoted in an EU study as being safe so once again in all three cases PE TG was giving off lest fumes then the safety standards say is safe now I generally don't want to breathe anything I don't have to breathe so I do use an exhaust fan anytime I print and most of the time I'm putting of PLA except when I need better layer adhesion and higher temperature control now why do people think PE TG is hard to print and why didn't I have any issues when printing on my Prusa i3 mk3 well let's look at this slide together look at the things you have to consider the first is your bed must be completely level now that's generally a good idea for every printer I have printers with both auto bed leveling and manual bed leveling your bed must be leveled approve of PE TG number two you have to think about bed adhesion and the way I handle bed adhesion is to use magic goo now this tube is about 18 bucks I think that's about the right price um they last me a long long time maybe six months or more for tube and I do a fair amount of printing you apply this to your print surface on both of the printers that I use today I'm using glass print surfaces but I've used it with a variety of different types of print surfaces and I applied about every three to four maybe three to five prints I find this does two things for me number one it helps with the adhesion of all filament PE TG in particular to the print surface but also PLA number two and how release at least on glass if I wait till that glass completely cools and I've used this whatever I've printed will pop right off if it doesn't I take a single edge razor blade and I just slide it under a little bit cuz it's glass I don't have to worry about scratching it and it comes right off so the bed must be level you must be have good print bed adhesion number three you got to get the temperature right and these are not all the same so this is hatch box PLA it recommends a temperature range of 220 to 250 this is Prusa PLA it recommends a temperature of 250 which means that I can't print it on all my printers I can print it on the a net et4 which has a top temperature of 250 this actually says 250 plus or minus 10 I can't print this on the ultimate 2 which only goes up to 235 I could print this on my Prusa and the very first PE TG that I found really easy to print that I purchased was from Sun Lu Sun Lu and it says it has a print temperature of 230 to 250 so every PE TG is different and you need to get the temperature right in general most of the PE TGS I set the temperature of the print bed to ad C there is one exception and that's my ultimate - my ultimate - is fully enclosed if I leave all the doors closed it gets pretty warm in there so I lower all the temperatures by 5 or 10 degrees C and I determine that via experimentation next you are going to have to retune your retraction in order to minimize stringing as you'll see on the various prints I printed on these two printers with PD TG there's a fair amount of stringing stringing is a little bit more of a problem with ptg so you have to fine-tune temperature and retraction now in my case the majority of the parts that I print with PDG are things like shelf brackets or this case a sanding they are things were stringing wouldn't be obvious they're not decorative items like this cube for those I'm generally using PLA but if you are printing something that has the potential for stringing you're gonna see a little more swinging of PE TG and then finally and here's the kicker this is the reason I think most people fail when printing with PE TG I think their G code start code the code you put into your slicer when you start a print is wrong what's wrong about it well very often in start code in particular if you're using abs but in general if you're going to print what's called an index line or a waist line that's a line is free on the side of your print bed in order to get the filament flowing often you'll see hard coded into the start code something like set the extruder to 200 set the bed to 60 that works great for PLA but guess what that's not gonna work for PE GG if they don't have that in their start code they may actually have nothing about temperature so what's gonna happen is the slicer is gonna run the start code it's then gonna get ready to print depending on the firmware on your printer it's going the slicer is going to issue a command to set the temperature let's say to 230 degrees C it's in take a while for that to warm up you're gonna go and start printing the printers not going to be a 230 degrees C yet it's going to print if it prints anything at all it's not gonna stick to the print bed so it is very very important in the G code start code we're gonna look at that together now now you have the right commands to wait for your printer to reach the proper temperature before it prints both the index or the wait line the line that's used to start the flow and as importantly or more before you go to print your actual object so let's look at some G code together here on the screen now when you look at this G code you'll see two three different sections you'll see G code that's in white that's sort of generic stuff you have G code in yellow those are specific things I had to make sure we're right to print with PE T G they were not in the G code I've been using on these two printers I didn't have to wait commands later on after the initial setting of the temperature so I to print my index line the printer would start cooling off I'd go to print it wouldn't stick to the print bed and then you'll see some items in red those are items that can cause problems and are often in a lot of G code so let's walk through this you'll see the first m-104 command is a command that says set put the extruder at 200 degrees put the bed at 40 and then it's commented out in this case but depending on whether I have an auto bed leveling system or not do a G 29 which will run the auto bed leveling system then if you skip over the yellow are the commands to actually print that waste liner that index line well if I don't have commands to reset the extruder and reset the bed they're still gonna be at 200 degrees Celsius and 40 degrees Celsius PE T G will not print they're the waste line will not print and in fact trying to force filament through my printhead when it set to louver temperature just a bad idea can cause it to Jam you'll hear the extruder grinding so I added these commands the 1m 140 to set the bed temperature and then the M 190 and to wait for it the m-104 to set the material temperature and the m109 to wait for it I then go ahead and print my index line and then once again down below I added the wait commands I had the commands already in there to set the bed and the material of temperature but I didn't have a weight so because I didn't have a weight I would start printing my actual object and the temperature wasn't right so your bed must be level you must have good bed adhesion you have to get the temperatures right you probably gonna have to fine-tune retraction but most importantly your start g-code has to be proper now if you get all of those things right what can you expect well let's look at some of the things I printed so this is the first thing I printed this is actually a hockey puck for a game called NOK hockey it's a desktop hockey game I print these out of PLA out of PE TG whatever I have in the printer this printed beautifully because it was printed on glass it's very very smooth I then printed this little toy this is a toy that snaps together and this is the first time I realized that getting supports out are little bit tricky because there was actually some fill in here and I had to use an exacto knife to get it out now this is a very interesting print there was an electrician in my house when I was doing this print he had shut off all the power in my house in the middle of this print I was praying this on the a net et for power came back on I went to the front of printer I said restart it restarted perfectly so I know that a lot of people have mixed opinions about the amet et4 because it has proprietary firmware I've become a fan of it now I don't like everything about it but it's a pretty solid printer this printed on it then I printed this item on it this is a longer print that stook about 4 hours it printed very very well there's no drooping but their only problem with this print is it's a little messy because there's a bunch of stringy so I'll either have to drop the temperature a little bit or fine-tune retraction to get this to print even better then I wanted to see how well layer adhesion would be on a long narrow Tower so I created this tower in Tinkercad and I printed and it printed beautifully next I went to print with some Prusa Pro cement PE PG all of these were printed with hatch box PE PG and this little sanding block was printed on the a net 84 at 230 degrees centigrade and it printed beautifully the only problem once again is getting the brim off is a little tricky and you're gonna have to use an exacto knife then I switched over to my ultimate to my monoprice I printed a pretty hard to print item and I don't have the extrusion the flow rate just right so this is this little box supposed to open and close it doesn't overall the print is actually quite nice I printed another item that has close tolerances it printed quite nice but both these are a little bit messy which means that while I was able to print very successfully on the ultimate - just like the stringing on the a net I do have to do a bit of tuning now that takes us to a fundamental belief I have about 3d printing it's as much art as it is science now I guess if you spend 3 4 or 5,000 you can spend $50,000 on a 3d printer and it comes with a technician to set it up and they fine-tune it for materials that they manufacture you're in a factory it'll probably work right every day but if you get a printer for $200 or $300 or even five or $600 you should expect you have to do a little bit of tuning to get it right and it will depend very much on the filament you use next I want to look at the space now the space was printed on a Prusa i3 mk3 it was printed in color fab xt color fab xt is a PE TG variant it printed I believe at 235 degrees Celsius and it points out a very important thing PE TG has the ability to print things that are very very clear or at least translucent something that's much more difficult in honor of other filaments so in summary if you level your bed you get the temperature right maybe you tuned retraction a little bit most importantly you use a bed adhesion material so you both can stick to the bed and release from the bed because PT G does stick layer to layer very well so some materials it won't release well unless you use something on there you have the ability to print PE T G on printers ranging from $200 $250 a nest ET for printers to $500 ultimate to monoprice ultimate to printers $2,000 Prusa i3 m k3s folks thanks so much for watching if you enjoyed this give me a thumbs up subscribe to the channel share this video if everyone you know and most importantly let's continue learning things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 123,655

Keywords: 3d Printing with PETG, PETG, PLA, 3d Printing, ANET ET4, Monoprice Ultimate 2, Cura 4.x, Cura 4.6, Gcode, GCODE start code, How to print PETG, PETG problems, PETG stringing, is petg safe, 3d printer safety, Ender 5, Prusa i3 MK3, Slicer, How to 3d Print, How to use a 3d Printer, Make With Tech

Id: WjxMA4CkUZc

Length: 21min 49sec (1309 seconds)

Published: Mon May 11 2020