I tried all sorts of brands, including rolls with neither a manufacturer info nor proper printing values on the spool.
Back in the day of 3mm filament being the only available stuff even stuff meant for totally different purposes.
But when we started to get more and more ‘reputable’ brands to choose from things IMHO did only get worse.
PLA is still the most used filament and a 1kg roll costs less than $6US to produce.
Not that different to other plastics.
The big thing we keep falling for is that THEIR brand and filament is better than the rest.
And the high prices are justified with development costs and such things.
It is the same scam that is done with toner and ink for paper printers.
YES, chances are that a quality brand filament performs better than a cheap no brand roll.
But I found quite often that even the most expensive brands often fall way behind their ads, specs and user expectations.
I recently tried a roll of Kingroon filament and went through it quickly and with no issues at all.
Ordered a big box more and still went through it all with no issues.
Only to now have a really pesky one where the diameter fluctuates so badly that it isn’t even any good for supports.
Elegoo I tried about 8 rolls in total, 3 of which being their rapid PETG.
Ordered the PETG because I needed to print some large and very sturdy things.
First roll made it almost till the end.
I started to get dark and brownish looking areas on my white print…
The second roll was a nightmare.
Same PETG, same color but the stuff required a total calibration.
First print with it failed after about 6 hours with a blocked nozzle.
I found some clear stuff in there that wasn’t glass more like grains of sand but crushable.
Tried again after cutting off about 5 metres but the testprint caused a block right away.
Contacted the seller, showed them some pics and they provided 3 replacement spools free of charge and asked for me to use the provided postage label to send the rest back for quality control.
Speed IS NOT everything, especially for a really large print.
What good is it, really, if you can use a speedy filament to cut 2 or 3 hours off a huge print but in return risk loosing the entire print ?
And realistically: For such expensive printers one would expect they come with a working filament sensor to adjust for changes in diameter on the go…
I have been through about 8 rolls of this rapid petg now. I like it but it is more prone to cracking and not as flexible \ impact resistant as standard Petg
I opened a new spool of Rapid PETG white and re-spooled it to a spool I printed in PETG (only spool I had available) and put it in my S2 dryer for 12 hours and it lost 1.7g
Maybe that cardboard is holding a lot of water.
Next time I have an empty cardboard spool I’m going to put it into a filament dryer just by itself and weigh it both before and after. These are just basic facts such that we should at least know the order of magnitude so that we can make more informed conclusions.
I haven’t had any issues the Elegoo filament and have purchased it multiple times. The best thing to do is buy the filament and test it. What works for some may not work for others.
I dried a freshly opened Elegoo cardboard spool in my Sunlu S2 dryer after transferring the filament to a new spool. After 4 hours in the dryer the cardboard spool lost 4.8g
I then dried a PETG Bambulab spool V2 that I printed a few days ago. I had the spool in the dryer for 5 hours and it lost .3g
Good to know! If anyone is so inclined, I think a good follow-up experiment might be to take one of those cardboard spools, not dried, and then seal it together with a dry roll of nylon or PETG or whatever interests you. Weigh each one individually before sealing them up together. Then come back days or weeks later and see how much, if any, of the water weight shifted from the spool to the filament. Then maybe we’d know better whether it warrants sequestering the cardboard away from filaments, either via rewinding or some other means.
Speaking of weighing things, I’ll just mention this as an aside, because I hadn’t previously known about such scales: I just recently acquired this 3kg scale https://a.co/d/9TmRFhX
and it has a nifty feature: you can do multi-point calibration on it, so that you can calibrate it with known weights at different points along its scale, to better control for non-linearity. I’m not a metrologist, so I can’t really guess as to how much of a difference this is likely to make, but after you hear about it, it’s one of those “Gee, why don’t all scales do that?” kind of things. It only requires the manufacturer to do an almost trivial amount more programming than it would otherwise do anyway.
This is extremely useful. I am curious how did you land on 91 degrees for softening temperature? The Elegoo site mentions the deformation temp for this filament as 62 degrees. I always thought that’s the same as softening temp.
I set Softening Temp to 1 degree above the maximum bed temp listed on the spool label “70-90C” to avoid any warning messages. I probably should have checked the web site specs. The tool tip indicates that door should be open and the top glass removed if the bed temp is above the softening temp to prevent clogging, I choose to ignore that warning. I always leave the door closed and the top glass on when printing PETG. I have had no clogging with any PETG that I have printed. I have not printed the gray rapid PETG in a while. I have been printing a lot of Elegoo White Rapid PETG (34Kg) and I have been having good success with bed temp set to 70C for Initial layer and 70C for other layers, printing mostly on Engineering Plate but also on Textured PEI Plate.
Thanks very much for the detailed description. I am using the same setup with their High Speed PETG black and Gray. It is performing great except on over hangs and bridges. I was thinking this could be related to cooling so changed the min / max cooling to 15 and 55 and set fan speed on overhangs to 100%. Getting much better results but not perfect.
Sure, I forgot this is in the A1 series section so I don’t think the softening temp would be relevant to the A1 since it is not enclosed.
I did have some defects in the bridging on my container project, The prints I have been doing with the white rapid PETG don’t have any bridging so I have not taken the time to try to dial that in. I was thinking of trying slower overhang and bridge speeds along with fan speed changes to see how that would affect the overhang and bridging. Now that I am thinking about it I have the urge to experiment.
The larger “Max Volumetric Speed” setting allows the printer to print the filament faster but not all models can take advantage of the
faster speed. I print a lot of large models with long straight lines that can take advantage of at least some of the additional speed.
I have found that even on some of my models with long straight lines, I get faster print times until the Max Volumetric Speed reaches a certain value and going any higher does not reduce print time.
I added a primitive Cube and set the dimensions to 50mm x 200mm x 2mm and sliced it with Max Volumetric Speed set to 12 and got a time of 37:40
I then changed the Max Volumetric Speed to 20, sliced and got a time of 31:38
I then changed the Max Volumetric Speed to 30, sliced and got a time of 31:26
One way I have found to improve print speed a little bit is to Use concentric top and bottom surface patterns, On the Cube example at the Max Volumetric Speed set to 20 the time was reduced from 31:38 to 30:48. (The default - Monotonic was used for the 31:38 time)
If you start with one of the generic profiles, you can hit some of the slicer speed limits even if your maximum volumetric flow rate would support it. This is especially true for 0.4mm and smaller nozzles. Otherwise, I don’t think anyone would even bother with speed limits. You would simply set your maximum flow rate and the slicer could use that to determine the maximum speeds possible given your specified layer height, line width, etc.