Hey Guys, I am printing with my XYZ Da Vinci Junior and when printing it seems to be skipping layers or something is wrong. When the print finishes you can stick your fingernail in certain sections and pry the part right in half. How do I stop this? It was printing perfectly fine before and the parts were solid and could not split in half.
It really depends on your environment and where the PLA is kept in your house/shop. I live in New York, which isn’t tropical, but my printers and all their supplies are kept in a shop which is really humid almost all the time. If I left PLA out for 3 weeks, I’d definitely have issues with it (and have had issues in the past).
The first thing you can do is dry it out in an oven at around 170 degF for a couple hours. Keep an eye on the filament during this process; if it’s on a black spool parts of that may get hot enough to start melting the PLA. If you don’t have an oven that can be set that low or are worried about melting it, you can also put it in a fridge for a few days (just not in the veggie or fruit drawers).
Once you dry it, there are a couple of storage options to prevent it from getting wet again; you really don’t want to dry it more than once in an oven because you risk messing with the material properties of the plastic. There are a couple of storage options out there; I use a weather-seal Ziploc bin with an Eva-Dry dehumidifier in it because of how much filament I have. With smaller amounts of filament, you can use the vaccum-seal storage bags or Rubbermaid containers and put a few packets of desiccant in each one with the filament. Desiccant is what’s in those little packets that come with the filament. If you Google silicon desiccant packs, you can get them on Ebay or Amazon for pretty cheap.
