this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
15 points (100.0% liked)

3DPrinting

20347 readers
98 users here now

3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.

The r/functionalprint community is now located at: or !functionalprint@fedia.io

There are CAD communities available at: !cad@lemmy.world or !freecad@lemmy.ml

Rules

If you need an easy way to host pictures, https://catbox.moe/ may be an option. Be ethical about what you post and donate if you are able or use this a lot. It is just an individual hosting content, not a company. The image embedding syntax for Lemmy is ![](URL)

Moderation policy: Light, mostly invisible

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
j4k3@lemmy.world
andypiper@lemmy.world
GrayBackgroundMusic@lemmy.zip
15
Crappy filament? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 week ago by idunnololz@lemmy.world to c/3dprinting@lemmy.world
16 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Not sure if anyone has seen this before but I bought two spools of PETG from Elegoo, one in white and one in black. Their regular PETG, not the rapid one.

Yesterday I printed with the white spool and it worked pretty well.

Today I tried to print with the black spool and the filament would not come out of the nozzle. I tried diagnosing the problem and ended up swapping nozzles, taking apart the nextruder and putting it back together. Then I tried printing again and again the filament would not come out. I swapped back to the white filament because at this point I've essentially ruled everything out except the filament and the white filament worked. I then tried the black again and it would not print. I cut off about 10cm of the filament and tried again and same issue. Finally I cut off about another 50cm and now it started to print.

I'm not sure if this has happened to anyone else or if anyone knows what the issue is. It's almost as if the filament refused to melt or had an much higher melting point vs the rest of the spool.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] IMALlama@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Way back when there was an American filament company that sold... very reasonably priced filament that actually printed well. As they got more popular they couldn't keep up with demand and it seemed like they started cutting corners. This resulted in their filament not having a consistent diameter as well as the occasional foreign object in the filament (a bit of charred plastic?), which lead to jams for many of us. They ultimately went out of business due to their reputation of struggling to fill orders and inconsistent quality.

If you still have the chunk of filament you cut off and also have some calipers I suggest measuring the end that you were trying to feed into your extruder. You could have had a physical clog, especially if your extruder was clicking.

[–] idunnololz@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I do not have a caliper unfortunately but I do have one arriving in the mail in a week or so. I realized I needed one once I started trying to design things with a tight fit.

[–] IMALlama@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Very nice! Welcome to the joys of designing and making functional parts. I suggest doing two things:

  1. Print, or buy, some radius gauges
  2. Make some test parts to understand how your filament and printer behave. For example, materials like ASA will shrink. I've also found that outer dimensions are much more true to CAD than inner dimensions, especially for things like smaller diameter holes for threads. Some text prints will help you figure out what input results in a given output