Filament quality

Sometimes the quality of the filament isn't the filament itself. I had a job running to create some openbuild plates that failed twice on me due to the way the filament was wrapped on the reel.

I came out in the morning to find the reel almost falling off the shelf each time about 2 hours into a 9 hour job. I untangled it and about 2 meters later it was tangled again, so this reel wont be used again, it was the Argos brand.


The filament itself was working fine, maybe if I empty another reel I may try re-winding it onto a new reel, but cost wise it really isn't worth it.


I also need to print a new nozzle cooler as this one fell off and got melted when the reel hung up.

I wonder is a driven unwinder would prevent that from happening. It would certainly take any strain off of the extruder from having to pull the weight of the spool feeding wire. They are used in the wire and cable industry when you make coated wire by driving the spools that you extrude the coating. Something else to work on.

I read about that issue on another forum. The only solution was to unwind the filament and rewind it. Like you, I don't know if it's worth the time, but.....

Has me thinking of my youth working at a movie hire place. When movies (still on reels came back in a not rewound state i would have to set them up on winders and wind from one reel to next.

Perhaps those winders are kicking about on ebay and can be adapted for filament winding.

Don Baer said:

I wonder is a driven unwinder would prevent that from happening. It would certainly take any strain off of the extruder from having to pull the weight of the spool feeding wire. They are used in the wire and cable industry when you make coated wire by driving the spools that you extrude the coating. Something else to work on.

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I think it's just the way the company wound it on the spool. We both have spools on ball bearing dispensers so there is very little strain on the extruder to pull it off.

is it pulling the filament from the side? in checking this out, i had seen one gent who had the filament reel at the top, and fed it down into the printer.

Feeding from the side. I'm not going to mount the filament reel on top of the printer due to the fact I just don't want to over load the acrylic too much or add that much weight up high which can enhance the vibrations the printer generates.

There is really a minimum of friction feeding from the side. The big problem Darren had was that the filament was pre-tangled at the factory. Not much you can do about that even if it was self fed or feeding from the top.

I ended up filing a return with amazon for a defective product, they issued a refund to me as soon as ups marked it as picked up.

Also, I had bought one of the hand held 3d pens. When I first saw them I thought they would be pretty useless. However, I realized that they could be used for fusing pieces, touch ups, and small repairs. This isnt pretty, but got my nozzle ring repaired...



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