3D Printing: humidity & keeping your PLA filament dry

It is generally agreed that you should try to keep your reels of PLA filament dry.

 

But I'm not sure that all suggested methods on the net make complete sense!

So here are my mad ramblings on storage and relative humidity.

3D Printing: filament grinding & nozzle blockage

My printer stopped printing part way through a print!

 

I'd never experienced this before...

...and I'm still not sure what the reason was for this problem.

3D Printing: time to replace the nozzle?

During the last 7 or 8 days, something bad has happened.

 

My 3D printer has been producing rubbish.

Something rather unexpected seems to have solved my problem.

Filament "pull" affecting 3D print performance

Friction in the filament feed path can affect 3D printer performance...

 

...or at least that is the conclusion I have come to over the last few days.

Here are my notes to back this up.

3D Printing: sticking and removing

This post is primarily concerned with 2 issues;

 

1) Getting your prints to stick to the bed

2) Getting your prints off the bed

3D Printing: I'm back in the saddle!

It is almost 8 years since I've posted anything on 3D printing.

 

That's largely because its almost 8 years since I last touched a 3D printer.

Well now that I have my own printer...I'm back!

MakerBot Replicator: Print Quality #3

We recently invited a guy into our organisation to conduct basic training on our MakerBot Replicator 3D printer for a bunch of department heads and other interested staff.

 

He also gave our machine a bit of a tune-up which has considerably improved print quality.

This post follows on from three previous posts: Replicator, Print Quality & Print Quality #2.

MakerBot Replicator: Print Quality

What level of print quality can you expect from your new MakerBot Replicator?

 

Here are a few illustrations which I hope might help show the sort of results you can expect from this model of 3D printer.

...Or maybe you get better results, in which case, I have a problem!

Having levelled the Replicator platform and left all other settings at their default values (e.g. nozzle & platform temperatures) I selected the "whistle" from  the ReplicatorG software example list as a test piece.