It's Not You. It's Your Filament.

hi this is Irv Shapiro with make with tech recently I had the opportunity to review the anchor make m5c which is a wonderful printer in the sub 400 dollar price range and include some very Advanced features one of the advanced features is the ability to print at higher temperatures many sub 400 dollar printers only allow you to print at about up to 230 degrees Celsius safely because of the structure of their hot end the m5c goes up to 300 degrees Celsius so that gave me the ability to print in one of my favorite filaments which is colorfab XT but requires a print temperature of about 240 to 260 C I generally printed at 250 degrees Celsius when I first started to print the first sample I ran into trouble the infill looked terrible it looked like the nozzle was hitting the infill and I tried all of the tricks in my bag to correct that and I'll talk about some of those in the video but it ends up it wasn't the printer it wasn't the slicer it was the filament the filament had too much moisture so let me tell you how I fixed that which leads us to a discussion of drying your filament and also the proper way to store your filament so stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] if this is your first Mako Tech video let me tell you that make attack is a collection of educational resources to help us learn together it includes over 200 videos here on YouTube many of them about this topic 3D printing it includes forum.makewoodtech.com a completely free place where you can exchange ideas with thousands of the viewers of these videos it includes the website at maywoodtech.com and it includes models that make with tech.com where you can go to download various models I've talked about in these videos now let's talk about filament and moisture the style of 3D printers we're talking today are fdm 3D printers that use filament to print now that filament is normally a form of plastic and depending on the nature of the plastic it may be hydroscopic that means it absorbs moisture not like a towel where you'll wring it out and you'll see moisture but enough moisture so that when you heat it up to a very high temperature to melt the filament so it can be extruded that moisture will boil off and if you've ever looked at a pot of boiling water you see all those bubbles well those bubbles will cause problems with Extrusion and problems as you extrude the filament layer by layer now there are two types of problems that I generally see with filament that has too much moisture and we'll discuss what too much moisture means in a minute the first problem that I see most commonly is the prince just look really bad there are gaps they're holes well you can think about it if you have moisture bubbling out that's not going to lead to a smooth bead a filament being extruded and in many cases when you extrude filament with moisture it doesn't lay flat on the Extrusion that causes the problems we see here so if you see really ugly infill you should check the basic things first make sure your print bed is properly leveled make sure the distance between the nozzle and the print bed is correct that's often called the Z offset even though Z offset as a term means something slightly different adjusting your Z offset will adjust the distance between your nozzle and the print surface make sure you're printing at a high enough temperature if you print at it too low of a temperature the filament will not spread out properly when it hits the print surface or when it goes layer to layer make sure you're not printing too fast you can make sure the flow rate in your slicer is correct those are all things for other videos but in fact if the infill in the first layers look like this you should check the moisture level of your filament now how can you actually check the moisture level of your filament now one way to measure the humidity from your filament is to measure how much humidity it's releasing into the atmosphere now you can't take that in the room but you can seal your filament into a bag and then put a meter in there and you can get these online I bought these from Amazon for a couple dollars each that will tell you the humidity now they're not absolutely accurate but they'll give you the right ballpark so in this particular case this is petgs happens to be prusa p-e-t-g and it says the temperature inside this bag is 71.6 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity is 33 percent now I can tell you the humidity in the air here is about 55 percent so that says that this filament is drier than the surrounding air and in fact under 40 percent is okay under 20 percent is really good under 10 is fabulous but you're probably not going to get that unless you print directly from a print dryer and we'll talk about that in a minute now when you print the nature of your filament will determine how much humidity is acceptable pla which is really the go-to filament for many people works really fine at under about 40 humidity and in fact your prints may still look okay if the humidity is higher but what will you see you'll see two interesting phenomena the first is the filament will be much more brittle if you have your filament breaking in your Bowden tube or breaking as it's coming off the Reel check the humidity the moisture level in the filament and think about drying it out and if you're getting a lot of stringy it may be retraction temperature other things it may also be moisture level now in other filaments like nylon if their moisture level is really above 20 percent plus you're going to have trouble printing with them the adhesion between the layers is not going to be proper it won't stick on your print bed overall the prints are going to look terrible so how did I diagnose this problem well the first thing I did is I happened to have another reel of colorfab XT and I went to print with it and it was just fine so then I thought I'd dry out my reel of color Fab XT and at the time I was using this particular print dryer which is made by a company called ebos and I was a little naive I set the printwriter to 70 degrees Celsius because this prints at a relatively high temperature and I want to dry it and I left it overnight and I came back and I had a block of XD filament this is no longer usable you can't get it off the Reel some of it's loose some of it's all stuck together so the first rule is dry your filament at the lowest temperature possible so most of the print dryers start at 50 degrees Celsius it ends up the petg which this is a variant of should probably never be dried at above about 55 degrees Celsius the only filament you really dry at a much higher temperature are nylon but they also print at a much higher temperature now what is the right temperature to dry it at well the first thing you want to know is what is the glass transition temperature of your filament and you can look this up online for any filament what is the glass transition temperature it's when the print goes from the filament goes from being rigid to rubber like or potty like it's not melted but it's when it gets soft at that temperature the filament will also begin to stick to itself now the glass transition temperature of petg is actually 85 degrees Celsius the glass transition temperature of pla is 60 degrees Celsius now pli we normally dry at 50 degrees Celsius so about 10 degrees less so 10 degrees less than p-e-tg would be 75 that shouldn't been a problem that leads us to the next thing you have to check on your print dryers and that is what's the actual temperature it's running at and it's not uniform in this enclosure with a smaller enclosure like this single filament dryer from Sun l u Sun loo then it's probably likely it's more uniform but in these larger enclosures what I found by measuring temperature a lot of different ways including putting a sensor right in the middle including using a thermometer at the top at the bottom is that the temperature can vary by 10 15 or 20 degrees Celsius that's a lot and so in this case this print dryer from evos and this is an old model so I'm not reviewing it I'm not comparing it to their current model but this particular one in general was running about 7 to 10 degrees hot that was enough at 70 degrees to cause me problems with my petg so since then I've been very conservative and I've been drying everything at 50 to 60 degrees Celsius and don't try it longer than the print dryer recommendation now let's look at these different print dryers and we can see the characteristics most print dryers have the ability to run the filament directly out of the print dryer and connect it somehow or another to your Bowden tube or directly put it at your extruder and that allows you to keep it dry the whole time it's running now that's very important for something like nylon for ploa and petg I haven't found that necessary but it's a nice feature to look for the next feature to look for is the front panel in this older IBO Cyclops version the button the push panel wasn't great another feature to look for is a indicator of the current temperature and humidity in this case it was a separate indicator and I've used this print dryer very very successfully for quite a number of years normally though at the lower temperatures now one of the printwriters I really like is this sun loo print driver what I like about it is it's very compact it's very easy to use it's easy to stick next to your printer it has a very sophisticated front panel this front panel requires you to double tap this button and you have to get the frequency just right but once you do that the controls here are very very nice it has defaults for different filaments so you can just select your filament and it will set the proper temperature and duration so you can see here if I set this to petg it's recommending a set temperature of 50 degrees Celsius currently inside it's 29 degrees Celsius and 53 percent humidity now one of the things I did look at on these various devices is how low could it pull the humidity down this one went down to about 15 to Celsius these two larger models did go down to about 12 degrees Celsius or less and so that is a slight Advantage for them this particular print dryer here is from fixed dry it's a new model they recently sent this to me in order that I can do these tested tests so it was a free sample for the review it has also a nice front panel I don't know if you can see that here and you can cycle through the various options here on the front panel it works quite well it's a simpler display than the sun Lu one of the limitations of this print dryer is the structure these sit in on rollers here which are quite nice but they were a little too narrow for the prusa reels of filament whereas the ebos was able to handle the prusa and the sun Lu was able to handle the prusa the overall fit and finish of this device is really quite nice and they have an interesting feature here they have a little deflector that they recommend you use when you're not printing directly from this device to keep the hot air from hitting the reels directly and it might have been that the hot air directly hitting this reel was why the 70 degrees Celsius impacted this print all three of these print dryers work effectively the nicest display is this one this is the most compact uh this is a very modern interface and display the display works the controls work well this ebos I really can't comment on at all because it's a couple year old model and I'm sure the new models are quite different in terms of temperature um all of them were somewhat variable the fixed right ran a little cool a little cooler than the set temperature the evos ran hotter which is more problematic the sun Lu was the closest to the actual set temperature in terms of price the current model of the evos is dual real filament dryer is 120 dollars the sun Lu was seventy dollars for a single reel they do make a double reel model and the fixed dry was a really a good value at 93 dollars for a dual filament real model now you've dried your filament if it's nylon you're going to print right out of your filament dryer if it's not you're probably going to take the reel you're going to put it on your printer and you're going to print that's great that won't cause any problems but let's say you let it sit there in my case in my lab environment where it's about 60 or 70 degrees humidity for a couple months or even a couple years like this reel and then when you go to print you're going to have stringing you're going to have bubbling you're going to have layers that don't look light and in some cases like pla it's going to be brittle does that mean you have to redry your filament every time well wouldn't be a bad idea but that adds hours to the preparation time so an alternative is to seal it with some desiccant which is are these little blue packets in a sealed bag and that will keep it pretty consistent for a much longer period of time well how do you do that well the product that I've been using is from e-sun and I buy these on Amazon they tell sell two versions one version where you get the bags and dissikant and you get a hand pump so basically what you do is you take the bag you put a reel of filament in it you press the pump down let me get this out of the way so you can see you press the pump down on the seal the little blue seal and you start pulling out the air now that absolutely works it takes a long time it's no fun at all now the irony is for literally five or six dollars more you can get a package of these from esun that also has a power vacuum unit so in this case what I do is you take a reel of filament this happens to be TPU I recently dried you put it in the bag and let's see if I can add a packet or two of the discipline and what is dissicant is a material that's been dried of all moisture that tends to absorb moisture it's like super filament so it absorbs moisture and therefore if you put it in with your filament it will pull some extra moisture off the filament in this case the version of this desiccant that you get from isan it turns red or pinkish when it's absorbed moisture so you throw a couple of these in and I don't know if it really matters where you put them I put one on the outside one on the inside then you seal the back now you can attempt to seal the bag by hand but I found that doesn't really work very well and they'll leak air in so instead they give you this little sealing tool that you run over the edge and you use it to seal the bag and I do that a couple times make sure it's good and sealed then you take the electric pump you put it on the air valve you press down and you turn it on and you're gonna see in a second the air being pulled out of this bag now this is going to take a couple minutes and it does a really really good job and it's painless so a set of I think 20 of these let's see I had a little note here by myself a set of 10 of these bags with the pump are 22. eight bags with the manual pump are fifteen dollars are there alternatives to this yes you can just take a big plastic bin that has a good seal you can buy this these at your home center sort of store you can put a larger desiccant in there there are many brands of dissikant and you can store all your wheels of filament in those bins the key is that you need to store it after it's been dried to allow you to use it immediately when you go to print next so folks in conclusion if you're getting terrible looking prints with lots of where it looks like the nozzle is hitting the surface of the print that could be caused by too much moisture in your print because here's what it looks like when you print on the same printer with the same filament that's completely dry I hope you learn something today you learned about filament dryers you learned about storing your filament either in bags like this or in bins with a large dissicant and if you did please give me a thumbs up subscribe to the channel I always encourage you to go to form.makewoodtech.com and join the discussion and folks let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 8,520

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printing for beginners, 3d printer, 3d printed, Filament Dryers, filament storage box, filament storage dry box, filament storage bag, filament storage solutions, filament storage bag vacuum, filament storage ideas, do filament dryers work, are filament dryers worth it, how to use a 3d printer, 3d printing ideas, 3d printing problems, 3d print, 3d printer filament types, 3d printer filament storage, 3d printer filament dryer

Id: TMHwVx4OIVc

Length: 22min 7sec (1327 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 10 2023