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Apr 2016

Maybe this filament is older?

The older it gets the higher the moisture content and the less quality you will get of your filament :slight_smile:

is it from the same manufacturer ? Have you left the material out in the air ? To me it seems to be a problem of under-extrusion but if you have printed ok with black and green then there is something wrong with the materail

Looks like some serious under extrusion.

Usually it means you have to either increase nozzle temp (at the cost of more stringing) or decrease printspeed (at the cost of having to wait longer).

Google “under extrusion” for more tips and tricks…

Could be under extrusion, also damp filament, check your hot end temperature, maybe raise it by 5 degrees.

I think the temperature of your hotend is too cold and your result is underextruded. Increase it and reduce your printer speed;

Melting temperature can change according to colour of your PLA.

Higt temp or water on the filament… 60 minutes at 60 C . on a stove…

Sometimes you get a bad batch. I had the same problem with white pla. Nothing would work well. After replacing it with a new role all problems disappeared. I had to reprint all my parts because they kept breaking due to non binding walls. The supplier just says it’s my printer and thermistor. Also found on the supplier’s website complaints about whote pla 2 years ago. So i probably got old stock from them.

Measure the diameter of the filament (at various positions) and check that the diameter does not vary over the length of the filament and conforms with the specification.
Could also be caused by moisture. You can extrude some length of filament and check the extruded length for bubbles/cavities/defects.

I have some green filament that does that. It may just be down to the quality of the filament. Is it from the same supplier/manufacturer? You could try different temperatures. Also check the diameter with a micrometer. The green I have is only 2.85mm not 3mm so I need different settings in Slic3r.

Good luck.

I have had something similar on one of my printers (Prusa i3): Possibly that the filament is more or less brittle and is being eaten up in your extruder and then ‘under extruding’ for some parts, may be happening more as it gets faster on long stretches… Increasing the temperature may temporarily seem to resolve the problem (or it could actually need a higher temperature to run on?) Have you used this filament before? If it’s being eaten up from the extruder (you may see chunks taken out of the filament as it goes past the hobbed gear - try stopping your print as it’s failing and backing up the filament 50mm to check) then you can try increasing the spring force on the extruder and also check the sharpness on the hobbed bolt or whatever hobbed gear you are using. As they wear out, they won’t be able to push with as much force and do more ‘rubbing’ plastic off. Although tuning those things is a good idea, it wasn’t the real reason for my problem, for me it was to do with a new hotend that I installed that is having trouble extruding at the same amount of pressure as my previous hotend and required more force from the extruder. I was using a hobbed stainless steel bolt that is quite old, so I got a new one from Mitre5 and printed a hobbed bolt making tool for a dremel (out of black PLA - Thing # 23717) and it’s been a huge improvement although still not able to reliably print white for hours on end. Slowing down the speed could reduce the issue but not really a solution…

Black filament is much easier to extrude out of the hotend (In my experience) as it’s usually made with multiple dyes at the end of a filament run and then black is added (so the manufacturer would combine all the left over bits of other colour filaments into another batch, add some black dye to it and call it ‘black’) and it becomes a bit more soft and easier to extrude as a result, white filament seems the opposite and is more brittle for me. This depends on the filament manufacture, filament is certainly not created equal. I live in a dry climate and don’t get any moisture problems so can’t really comment about moisture.

So the rule here is that different filaments have different printing characteristics. Even though they are all ‘PLA’ they may have different temperatures and force required to push them out of a hotend. I spent a month messing around until I was certain this was a hotend issue and not my filament. For you however, it doesn’t mean at all that it’s a hotend issue, but more investigation is required.

it is underextruded try set flow by 20% or rise temp by 5 until ok ,if not working, let it cool down on 130 release filament cut and insert it again

are you at the end of the spool? some printer have difficulty to pull the filament if the spool center is to small.

You might be looking at a partially clogged nozzle? I’ve had the same in the past, the PLA is then burnt inside the nozzle & is *partially* blocking flow.

Strangely, blue PLA was giving me more frequent blocked nozzles than - for example red or white PLA did…

Let me know, if you need more details.