When I bend my PLA filament, it breaks immediately,
I dried it in my filament dryer for 24 hours, it still breaks…
Is my filament too old now to use ?
I have some really old PLA (8 years-ish) that does the same thing and I attributed it to age.
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Question for both of you, was the filament in a place where it would have UV light shining on it, and was it vacuum sealed when you stored it or left out in the open or in a box that might not have been sealed as good as you thought?
The reason I am asking is I am wondering if age alone is enough cause the problem, or is it age+UV or age+moisture.
@tweety55, do you have a kitchen scale? If so, could you weigh the filament, put it back in the dryer for another 24 hours and weigh it again tomorrow. If the weight goes down at all, keep it in the dryer for another 24 hours and keep doing so until it stops weighing less.
I always dry new filament I buy, no matter what type. And there have been a few that took at least 2 days to dry. If you do the test above until it stops weighing less, and the filament still breaks easily, than it confirms that it is due to age and not due to moisture.
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Not exposed to UV light but also not sealed. 8 years ago I didn’t know the follies of filament and moisture. I’ve thought about drying it to see if it’s recoverable but honestly its really the lowest of priorities. It’s 8 year old filament.
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Prolonged exposure to humidity will causes the polymer chains of the Polylactic Acid to break down returning it to the pre-polymerized state. Kind of you take the P away from the PLA leaving you with just the unlinked monomer LA ( Lactic Acid) and there is no easy/effective way to repolymerize it again while in filament form since just drying it at elevated temperatures will not release the water that is now bonded within the Lactic Acid.
Replace the filament with fresh one
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Ditto what @Panamon_Creel says. You should be able to bend PLA in a sharp curve. While it may show some fracturing, it doesn’t break. I got some free PLA with my printer and ended up throwing it out. I think it was just old stock they use for samples. After disassembling an AMS to retrieve bits and pieces several times, I caned it.
Fresh PLA should be able to do this (photo). Don’t mind the color of the thumbnail, I just peeled a couple of oranges.
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Thanks for all the answers, I will not use this filament anymore, it went to the bin now
thank you Panamon_Creel, I like technical answers and Ken-N-Texas for your photo.
My really old PLA is brittle straight out of the unopened roll, however if I snap a few feet off then a little way into the roll it is less brittle.
Overnight the end goes brittle again.
I try to only use this sort of filament for single colour prints, and ideally cut it in the AMS before the print has finished so that it doesn’t have to be retracted too far back.
Also I try not to store this sort of filament with the end fed into the AMS - as it can snap overnight. (I use a little clip on ‘parking zone’ inside the AMS to hold the end.
I’ve been trying to use the old filament up on similar things to the models of use for multi colour flush-into.
Quite a few parts of this table were created from 5yr+ filament, with the colour swaps created by snipping off the filament every now and again (to avoid long retractions which put a strain on brittle filament)…
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You saved me a roll of filament Ukdavewood, unbelievable, I cut a few feet of my filament, and your right, only the first part is brittle, thank you.
Nice table to…
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