Hi All,
The last day I have been priming with Overture PETG and I am getting a lot of angle hair stringing. How can I avoid that?
I am new to PETG. I normally print with PLA or ABS.
Any advice would be great
The setting for that can be influenced by Z Hop. Just to be clear, this is a very advanced topic and likely the hardest thing to calibrate. Many people simply rely upon using a lighter to burn off the wispy filaments.
Although there is a calibration feature within Orca Slicer, I can tell you it does not work well, I’ve had better luck through printing a string torture test and then manually adjusting it to minimize stringing.
Stringing occurs when the nozzle lifts off the model and there is enough molten filament to ooze. Some of this can also be mitigated by lowering the print temperature. A temp tower is useful for this.
Don’t go crazy on string test models. There is a lot of over-thought models on the Internet. To spikes is all you need. The smaller the model the faster it will print and the more trial and error you can perform. Here’s a simple one.
Temp is another factor. An option is to use a Temp Tower. Orcas has the best baked-in model. Just print the tower and look for the temp with the least
Here’s what to look for. On each level there is a window with a tiny spike. It’s easier to use a cell phone photo to zoom in because that will allow you to see clearly which temp level has the least amount of stringing. As always, it is a tradeoff between lower temps and layer adhesion vs stringing and such with PETG.
If your PETG is stringing, your filament needs to be dried and/or flow and/or temperature isn’t tuned well enough.
I get zero stringing on PETG prints. But flow has to be really, really accurately calibrated. Manual calibration, not the machine’s automatic calibration.
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Thank you both. I will try all of the above.
Filament is dry. Has been drying for 10 hours at 55 Deg C.
While time and temperature are both important to drying filament, humidity is also important. How did you dry and if it was in a filament dryer, what was the humidity when you pulled the spool?
When I pulled it out it said 15%
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I did struggle quite a bit with PETG in 2023. Having spent ~2 months, I found my personal key items when printing PETG.
Besides the already mentioned mandatory drying and calibration, I now check a few key things:
- Cooling settings from the Generic PETG settings
- Wipe while retracting enabled (see @Olias screenshot from Orca above. In Studio, this is usually disabled in the defaults. You need to enable that!). You can also increase the retract speed to 45mm/s. The z-hop while retract will help if the nozzle is de-pressurized before the z-hop occurs (hence the wipe).
- Speed settings. In my personal experience, PETG rewards taking your time with it. I usually lower print speeds to 80mm/s for PETG Basic, 120mm/s for PETG HF and accelerations to 25% of defaults.
There are further things to keep in mind when printing PETG (never use a crossing infill or surface pattern!!!), but they are not relevant for stringing.
While this is purely my own personal experience, I do hope it helps somewhat.
and 