And more strangely, does it suddenly go bad?
I printed this pair of glasses with a roll of ugly bright green PLA I use to print prototypes or silly things with - because, well, it’s ugly - at the last minute to go to a party where the idea is to not look too serious.
But it took me three tries: the nose bridge readily broke off the first print without even trying very hard, and one hinge split in the middle before I could even drive a pin through it. I was really careful with this third print and I managed to complete the assembly and leave to go to the venue.
But it’s really weird: this roll of PLA had been in the printer’s room for at least 2 years, I and others have printed a million things with it without any problems as recently as last week - including multiple iterations of these glasses - and today the prints feel “dry”, or less “waxy” that other PLA parts when I file them smooth, and they’re really brittle.
Also, it’s winter and here up north, it gets really dry in the winter - like 15% humidity - so I’m pretty sure the material is quite dry.
What gives? Any idea?
Partially clogged nozzle?
I don’t think so. I printed other things in different rolls of PLA before the glasses and they came out fine. Also, I purged several times to switch to green and the flow of molten PLA looked normal.
Hmm, how much did you print with the spool? Is it possible it got moisture in it, but sitting for so long dried out the outer layers of the spool but not the inner layers?
It’s a one-kilogram spool and I’d say half of it is gone. It’s never been problematic in any way. It even got a real workout recently as my coworders used it quite a bit to print Christmas tree decorations. Again, nobody had any problem. And in fact, it printed my eyeglass frames just fine - three times. It’s just that they were really brittle for some reason.
Before leaving yesterday, I started an 8-hour print with a spool of flat black PLA. I’ll see how it turns out today. If it’s good, I’ll reload the green filament and reprint the glasses to see if they come out as fragile as yesterday. It’s a 10-minute print so it’s a quick test.
Yea, super weird. Curious how the black turns out, maybe you just got a bad spool with a manufacturing defect.