My first Bambu Lab PETG. It was so brittle, right out of the bag, I could not bend it through the spool retaining holes without it breaking. Even after 24 hours of drying, it breaks with the slightest bend. Is this a defective batch? Am I doing something wrong? Is there any hope of getting a refund? I know BL tech support is terribly bad. I haven’t even tried running it through the printer yet. I’m afraid a filament break will clog the print head.
Love the printer, hate the filament.
I’m not doubting the experience you’ve had with PETG… but I have run through a couple of dozen spools of it, colored and translucent, and have not had the issues you are describing with a single one. Maybe you got a bad spool?
I printed a small piece with it, and it came out OK. I guess I’ll use it sparingly until it blocks the extruder. Yes, I think I got a bad batch.
If it’s super brittle, it could be that it’s absorbed a bunch of water. Good news is that it’s usually the few outer ‘layers’ of the spool that get affected… typically. Although the Bambu spools have holes all over them, so it may be different.
Unfortunately, it seems to be brittle all the way through. I pulled off a lot of it from the spool, and it still broke very easily. It finally broke during a print job, so I junked the spool. I don’t know what BL return policy is like, but I feel certain that returning it would be more trouble than it’s worth. The poor availability of filament from BL has convinced me that BL filament is not worth the extra cost. Amazon it will be.
That’s a bummer man. Sounds like you got a dud.
And I’m with you on the filament availability. It’s kinda pointless to have a membership program if the things you can buy are never in stock. And the non-membership price is not a great deal at all.
I very much enjoy the (mostly) plug-and-chug process when using the Bambu filaments, but now that they’ve improved the process of tuning filaments and being able to save presets, I’m going to seriously look into alternate suppliers. The Polymaker and Esun options look intriguing.
Sorry you got a bad spool… that’s frustrating.
I used HatchBox filament for 10 years on my old printer. I always had good results.
Through the my new AMS, I’ve run:
Hatchbox PLA and ABS
Overture PLA
Carbon (Food Safe) PETG
All of those printed just fine. It would be great if Bambu Lab has some refill filaments available, but if they don’t, I feel like I’ve got equally good backups.