I have an Anet A8 (Prusa i3) the first 2 spools of PLA I bought for it were Gold Camel brand White and Wood colour. everything worked perfect right from the test print. I ordered several spools of PLA from Amazon for about $10 less/spool in blue yellow, red and black. These all are not brand name. All came packed well and vacuum sealed…NONE of the prints with these ones has been successful.
I changed the tape to brand new blue tape, I wiped it with acetone. I tried using the hairspray, i used the glue stick, i bumped up the printhead temp from 200c to 210c. I increased the bed temp from 60c to 65c. I unfailingly re-level and adjust the bed height for every attempt. This different filament simply refuses to stick.
the items tend to peel up (if they partially stick at all). They pull off and melt to the print head or they end up as random strands.
Fortunately I keep my hair very short because otherwise I would be pulling it out in frustration.
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Does the filament stick if you print with rafts? If it lays down fine and stays down using rafts I would think bed leveling would still be the issue.
Also sometimes cheap filament price wise equals poor filament. What was the brand you bought off of Amazon?
I am thinking it is the material as well. Rafting doesn’t help much. Levelling the bed has been done for every attempt and I am being very picky about that. The filament is AMZ 3D.
The Gold Camel brand worked perfectly right from the first test print.
Hello Rob,
i wish there were qualitys standards by which filaments were manufactured and could be compared / tested. Perhaps there are some, but I am not really aware of any including e.g. raw material quality etc.
I have had similar issues, some really good filament was delivered with my printer, it worked great out of the box, but then I bought middle priced European manufactured filament and right away crazy looking first layers warping upwards (same for ABS and PLA). Gluestick helped with the ABS _but_ it made my next PLA prints difficult because it does not come off the printbead very easily. So you need to use warm water and a sponge / cloth to get the water soluable glue off. Alcohol and Acetone will sometimes just smear it around.
After that the only way I managed to get successfull PLA prints was to reduce the extrusion flow parameter, for the first layer to a crazy low 80%! For some reason the “mid price PLA filament” was expanding outside the nozzle so much that there was simply way to much material. (measured the filament with calipers and it was 1.75-1.80mm) Over the first few layers I then went on to gradually raise the flow up to 100% again. (on the original Prusa i3Mk2 you can do this live on the machine during printing…) and this was on a clean PEI sheet, temperature 60degrees Celsius.
I have a background in CNC machining, it is easy compared to 3d printing, you only have two parameters to worry about, feeds and speeds.(ok there is a few more also in CNC…) In 3d printing I have noticed that there is a bigger challange because you have a load of parameters to take into account, two temperatures, different speeds, fans, materials, bed-preparations, flow and even filament color! (which I at first totally underestimated) and so on. So basically you need to experiment a lot more because you have so many parameters to change. Thanks to Joseph Prusa who has understood that and lets you do it live on the machine during the print. I don’t know other printers but probably they have the same kind of options. But also the software developers should learn from this and let you specify different settings for different parts of the print. Until now I have used Slic3r and Cura and while they do have options for changing the layer height during a print I have not been able to find settings for changing all those parameters over the curse of the print. Probably need to learn gcode editing by hand for that …
Anyway I am getting of the subject here, good luck, don’t give up. Try playing with the extrusion / flow parameter, this is what worked for me in the end.
BR,
Risto
Hi Risto.
Thanks for a very well written response. I think I have found the issue and it makes perfect sense. The first 2 spools i ordered are PLA, the other spools I ordered are PLA EXCEPT the blue spool. When I checked on the brand name I noticed that among ALL the PLA spools (packaged identically) the one spool of blue is ABS. it just goes to show you. Check EVERYTHING. assume NOTHING. i attempted the print again with the bed ‘as is’ using the stock settings. As you might expect…PERFECT print, good plate adhesion…
Now if you will excuse me, I have a full course of egg to wash from my face. Thanks everyone, and as obvious as it may sound, check EVERY spool, don’t assume that if the packaging is identical and they are from the same source, that all are the same .
I feel stupid but relieved that everything is working great again.
Hello Rob,
no problem. But I had similar problems with the PLA as described, check out the pictures.
Anyway good luck and happy printing then!
Try the Zebra Plate. It solved all my issues. I use it on the Wanhao i3 and FF Creator Pro. Problem solved. No more lifting, or bad adhesion. But you can easily get things off by flexing it. It returns to flat right away.
