3D Printers, Makers, DIY hacks, solutions and post printing tools

Created by Emil Pop on 13 April, 2018

When the shit hits the ceiling, printing with crappy filament is a pain in the butt.

I am not going to beat around the bush here, is Christmas time, I got some days at home, and I decided to get rid of some money I thrown in a bin last year.


How did I do that?


Easy, a Chinese company called E-Sun contacted me to convince me to sell their filament around the world, so I bought from them 10 reels , white, black and blue PLA (yes color matters, the pignemtation changes a bit the filament behavior in printing and post printing), same with ABS, TPU, and PVA, last one a single reel, natural colored, for supports only.


I said I bought, because if a company offers me samples , chances are they send me something they can trust, well selected, maybe even product of some quality competitor, just to make me believe they are a good quality producer, but if you buy from stock, whatever happens to be in the stock that moment they have zero control of what you receive, and by the time they learn you bought it and tested it, it is too late to fake some good filament to fool you.


In my one month of tests on their reels, I came to the following conclusions:

They have no clue what is in their boxes, they would lie to me all the time to convince me I am doing things wrong and that is why i get wrong results, they are not reliable, nor trust worthy.


Why?


To start with, all their filament comes in some cozy cardboard solid boxes, gift shop type, but inside...


Filament is in a vacuumed bag with a silica pellets bag to keep it dry.


I open the bag, put the filament in my printer, start printing, nozzle clogs in 2 minutes. Every single reel.


I ask why, they tell me I am using wrong temperature, too low.


But in the same time filament pops in the nozzle like popcorn all the time (wet) so they tell me I am using too high temperature, too high.


How can that be that in the very same instant, printing at the same temperature it clogs and it pops, how can I use too high and too low temperature in the same instant?


Their answer was I am doing something wrong anyway, they just haven't figured it out.


Hence I figured it out on my own.

I started printing from the lowest PLA temperature (or ABS when printing that, or TPU when printing that) indicated by them in their charts on the back of their cozy boxes and went up until filament was printing relatively uniform.


I found out with no exception that at any given temperature it popped because of humidity in the filament, hence they were not drying it corectly in the post production, to start with, than all their reel printed without cloging only above their maximum indicated temperatures, for instance PLA I got it to print without clogin my nozzle at ABS nromal temperatures, 225 Celsius to 240 Celsius. Hence it was not only PLA on that filament, they were also bits of ABS, it was cross contaminated at pellets level, and whatever mix extruded, they packed it wet and tuck a silica bag into it before vacuuming, thinking that would do.

Well it didn't do.


So I dried it for 10 hours at 50 Cesius ventialted specialised dryer oven for filament (no improvisations used) and tested it again, water was gone, printed without popcorn baking effect, but the cross contamination was still present, and that had bad influence on the final product, for to print I was going high temperatures, so that I melted the contaminat, but that baked the lower temperatures products, hence my final parts were having a brittle component in them all the time, pretty much all over the place.


Since in those tests one never prints large volumes, just small batches, each reel I got still remained with about 900 grams of filament on it.


Option one was throw it in the bin, option 2 was to run another group of tests not related with their filament, a test that I am explaining in my "Filament preservation" discussion, where i wanted to see if I preserve well dried filament in vacuumed bags and no silica pellets around would do for a good long term preservation. It works perfectly. Go read that post, you will understand why.


And now it is Christmas, and I am home a few days all day, so I reached to the compromised filament bags thinking to print something irrelevant out of it, some 10 centimeters diameter cups, 10 centimeters high, basically a pipe with a bottom.


But since I have no use for such a thing and semi burned to add insult to injury (yes, the filament stayed dried all this time, but it did not decontaminated itself) the only use is as a tool holder, so I decided to print it upside down and with supports everywhere, that means in my cup there is a honeycomb vertical walling of holes for about 0.5 centimeters diameter, hexagonal pipes thin walled on which the flat bridged bottom will be printed.


The thing is if I wanted to design it with the hexagonal holes I would of spent a few hours more, but the simple cup took me 10 minutes only in FreeCad, and if after I print it I leave them supports in there, voila, I can put in the cup screw drivers, Allen keys, or router bits, each in it's own hole dedicated, no jamming in taking out, no headache.


That is what I thought, but the headache came in printing anyway.


You know when you run tests, you keep changing reels, each time you re lock the filament in the reel holes, and it might cause it to tangle the winding in the last row. Each time I re used that reel I blamed the tangling on that so I never actually took it into calculation on the product quality.


I should of.


Now each print is about 150 grams, and to my bitter surprise about every 3 to 5 layers on the reel, the filament is so tangled (nothing to do with me reusing the reel) from production spooling process without proper tension and proper aligner system that I must actually pull it by hand while holding the reel with the other hand to make it come through the tangling. Otherwise the extruder just trips over the whole reel from the printing dryer oven on top.


It has being printing for two days now, still half reel to eat up, and I technically have to be here every 5 minutes to pull the filament out.


That being said, I do not endorse or recommend any ESun filaments both for their poor quality control in pre production cross contamination and sloppiness in drying, spooling, annealing the spool, and ensuring quality end output, and for their attitude towards whom found this errors, that instead of being acknowledged and corrected, were hidden, covered up, sanded and the founder smeared.


I am buying regularly online a lot of filament, various grades, from PLA to PEEK all the way up, most come with no cozy box, no silica bag, just a plastic transparent vacuumed bag and a sticker on the reel indicating the producer, production date and a captcha code, and they work like a marvel.


I call that seriousity, and I respect that. Branding I agree with, but passing shit for branded chocolate and getting angry at whom calls shit for what it is, nope, I have zero respect or tolerance for that.


My piece of advice is: Own your own knowledge, you don't have it? Build it up, read, test, understand, dedicate time. Than just as the Bible teaches us in 1 Thessalonians 5:21

"Test all things; hold fast to that which is good."


Don't trust me, run your own independent tests, and if you can find a filament or other things in life that are done well, decently priced and reliable, mark that producer in your mind and stick to them until things change in bad (sometimes the business is sold and the new owners change things to make more money)


In other words, be smart, patient and well educated makers.