Wow, what a nightmare… I was using up some Inland silk PLA that I had bought at MicroCenter some time ago… no big deal, I wasn’t a fan of the color, so figured I’d use it to print some reuseable filament spools to transfer my cardboard filament onto.
This stuff is a nightmare… It clogged up the primary feed gear in my AMS, requiring me to completely disassemble the primary AMS motor assembly, there were bits of what almost seems like shredded satin ribbon wrapped around the filament wheels, and nothing would feed.
Thinking I was all set, and confirmed the AMS was feeding again, I go to print… now the extruder isn’t taking filament in. So, disassembled the extruder, and found similar bits of what looks like shredded satin ribbon (presumably what gives the “silk” effect) wrapped around the filament wheels, and clogging everything up… I literally had to pick the pieces out with a dental pick to get all that junk out of there… You can see in the photo here how the “silk” is literally shredding off the filament, and the little blob of it that was wrapped around the wheels in the extruder.
Thankfully, its finally fixed and printing again.
If you’re going to run “silk” filament… stick to the Bambu or other top tier quality brands… avoid the cheap stuff.
Did you dry your filament before declaring it unfit for the application? Most importantly, if you did dry it, did you weigh it before and after to verify how much moisture was removed. I ask because I’ve had Bambu Silk filament fail on me in precisely that manner and after getting a dryer months later, Viola, it started to print normally. I took out nearly 2% moisture by weight from that partial spool.
Guess which one of the Bambu Silk filament print tests was wet?
Well, here is the problem with that approach. What if the filament was already dry. Then if you weighed it afterward, you would know for sure that moisture was not a factor. Then you could pursue another theory. Right now the only thing that you know for sure is that you had it in the dryer, you can’t know if the filament lost moisture.
BTW: The photos I posted above show Bambu silk filament straight out of the vacuum pack, which makes it hard to keep believing they’re a “top-tier” supplier. Sure, their prices are top-tier, but their service? Not so much. They have constant stockouts of basic filaments like black and white PLA, along with frustrating mid-order formula changes. The real kicker here is that users in this community have reported receiving multiple spools in the same shipment only to find color shifts between them—supposedly the same filament, yet visibly different shades. That kind of inconsistency is unacceptable from any supplier claiming to be top-tier.
