Im having big Trouble with my last order of PETG HF. Unfortunately i ordered 18kg and spool after spool apears to have the same problem.
Almost exactly the first half of the spool prints well. Then prints become miserable. What i see from the moment when prints starting to get ugly i also can see the filament on the spool isnt dark and full black anymore. It has this weird white/grey haze on it. Not removable.
Then i put it under microscope - and i saw its not just a haze, its more like a mechanical defekt on the filament.
On the pictures you cann see start/first half of the spool and the second half of the spool.
The filament was dried for 12 hours. And again, and again, no changes.
It already happend with 6 of 18 tested spools.
Im waiting for bambulabs answer on my ticket, maybe someone knows whats that?
Also, i made another test. I spoolt one out of the box filament spool to another empty spool. Didnt do anything like drying or smth. And again - after first half of spool this issue appears.
At what temperature did you dry the filament? Looks like the lower layers of the filament deformed due to heat and pressure, or that they are slightly fused to the layer above…
“Also, i made another test. I spoolt one out of the box filament spool to another empty spool. Didnt do anything like drying or smth. And again - after first half of spool this issue appears”
Dunno whats going here (no answer to your problem) … but honestly, I’m a little confused… What I read:
The first half of spool is fine, the second half is bad. I understand.
However, when another spool is respooled onto another, empty one … the original first half is now at the bottom, and the bottom/second one (let’s assume it’s bad cos manufacturer’s error) ends up at the top. So now they are reversed -what was first before, is second now, and vice versa …
And yet, even here, the first half is OK and the second half is not?
I just want to add my experience here because I am facing the exact same issue with PETG HF from my latest order. The material was shipped from the German warehouse.
I bought 16 spools in total. Three of them are opened, the rest are still sealed. All three opened spools show the same pattern:
The first half of the spool prints perfectly, deep black and smooth. From roughly the middle of the spool onward, the filament surface visibly changes. It becomes matte and develops a white/grey discoloration that cannot be wiped off. Exactly at the same point where the filament starts to look different, the print quality collapses. I get strong, inconsistent over-extrusion over several layers, always in waves. The behaviour is identical on all three of my printers.
This is not moisture. One spool was dried for 36 hours at 65 °C with zero improvement. The defects appear in the same place on each spool, always starting in the second half. It’s also not model-related – I have printed the same parts hundreds of times before without any issues.
I have been using Bambu PETG HF for a long time and have processed many dozens of kilos of it without a single problem, so this is definitely not normal behaviour for this material. My conclusion is that this must be a production or extrusion issue affecting at least part of this batch.
Support unfortunately keeps asking for further tests (different models, different shapes, etc.), but the symptoms are extremely consistent and clearly tied to the physical condition of the filament itself. At this point I’ve handed the case over to PayPal Buyer Protection because the material is simply not usable for production work.
If anyone else from the EU/Germany has received PETG HF with this same surface change halfway through the spool, it would be interesting to know. This looks very much like a batch issue rather than isolated cases.
Hi, just the same thing here. Honestly the bambulab customer support is the worst support i ever came across my whole life!
Its a disaster
They even ignore european laws and trying to refuse any return by all costs, wich almost looks like they ask for more proof and more test prints and this and that for weeks until i customer is just pi$$ed so much until a customer just give up
This happened to me alrready with a printer 6 months old under warranty with a broken mechanical part. After 2 weeks i was so stressed that i just bought the spare parts on my own
Back to the filament issue- it IS a manufacturing error. Even, if you come close to the end of a spool, you will see that the filament sticks together and also breaks instant if you try to unspool it
Dont give up, dont accept this and dont play the game with "can you clean your print bed, can you test print this file and send pictures, can you cell me the cooling settings ect ect. DO NOT!
They can’t ignore laws, they HAVE to accept return without any proof or what ever.
For me it tooks 3 weeks! until they provided me a return label. I wrote them every single day
I had to include Germany civil code 355, i was getting super agressiv to them, i openend a ticket on paypal, and i told i will go the lawyer.
All this was necessary to finally get my return label
Now i will have to text them every day again to ask where is my money and i want it back immediately
I can’t speak for other European countries but at least in Germany there is a “Widerrufsrecht” meaning you can unconditionally return items to the seller if they were bought online (you don’t even have to provide a reason why you want to return the items). Minimum acceptable timeframe after receiving is 14 days but the seller can offer longer times and the seller has to declare in advance who has to pay for the return shipment.
All this has to be written in a “Widerrufsbelehrung” and sent to the customer.
If failing to provide this to the customer, like with all my orders I have never received a Widerrufsbelehrung from my seller “Bambulab GmbH” (which is legally a Germany company so German laws apply here) then the 14 day time windows for returning goods does not start until either you receive the “Widerrufsbelehrung” or a year has passed.
Meaning: In Germany, since Bambulab GmbH doesn’t send this Widerrufsbelehrung, you can return goods unconditionally for up to 1 year and 14 days.
(Disclamer: I’m no lawyer so this is my novice knowledge and might be completely wrong)
Anyway, I’m happy with the printer any my accessories and filament so far (haven’t opened a PETG from my recent orders yet) so I don’t want to make a big fuss about it, still, it’s not good to see companies seemingly ignore local laws.
That’s exactly the objective. Two things are free to bambu labs:
Sending you a request to do something you have already done or make another video.
Your time.
Parts are not free.
Experience suggests their support people aren’t rated on “time to close” or “customer satisfaction”, they are rated on “how much did this ticket cost to close”.
I’m told there are two kinds of filaments manufacturers, large scale and boutique/mid scale. Even manufacturers you think of as large scale might not be (prusa for example). I’m guessing 90% of the filament manufacturers are not large scale.
The difference is the large scale manufacturers do not spool onto 1kg spools, they extrude on huge 50 or 100kg spools and then re-spool onto small spools.
For small operations, when they take the 1kg spool off, the filament needs to go someplace, and what happens is it get stored in the buffers till they can get another spool loaded. The buffers are a set of spools which dynamically expand in distance apart making a large “loom” of filament that is waiting.
So what you might be seeing is the difference between filament that has been cooled longer vs not, or perhaps the process of expanding the loom is stretching the warm filament thinner.
Do you see any difference in the bad filament vs the good, for example in diameter or cross-section?
You opened a ticket with PayPal and are still waiting for a refund from Bambulab? Normally, PayPal takes care of everything as soon as you file a buyer protection claim!?
now it makes sense 
