I’ve printed some filament clips (The Perfect Filament Clip v2 by LightBulb - MakerWorld) from Bambu PLA Basic, and they work well, but it looks like they deform after being baked in filament drier (at 55 Celsius). So I figured PETG may be more suitable. However, ones I printed from Bambu PETG Basic are brittle, layers separate when I bend them. On the picture you can see which layers I am talking about; I bent it a lot for that picture to make it well visible, but I hear the cracking when I bend them even much less. I used all stock settings in the slicer, I just changed the filament from PLA to PETG. When I bend the ones printed from PLA, nothing like that happens - no cracking, they get back to the original shape after I release them. Any idea? Is it supposed to be like this? Do I want to change some settings when printing PETG?
Here’s the PLA ones, baked one on the left, fresh one on the right:
Dryness was part of it. I dried the filament, and it got better. But it still cracks in the same way when I bend it a little more. It may not be a problem in regular use, since I don’t normally bend those clips just because, but still, I don’t get it. The PLA clips don’t have this problem at all - I can bend them a lot, more than the PETG ones, until they get irreversibly deformed, and even then, when I bend them more, they finally break, but the layers don’t get separated. It breaks like a solid piece of plastic. It’s like PETG doesn’t stick to itself well, unlike PLA.
I searched the forum a little, and it sounds like stock settings for PETG Basic may not be good enough?
It’s not that I bake them for the sake of it, but clips go on spools, and spools go into the dryer, and the clips don’t like it at 55 degrees.
I do use different spools. I want the opposite of clever, I want dumb pieces of plastic that just work
For the settings, typical PETG defaults tend to be fast and overcooled. You can improve layer adhesion by printing below 100mm/s and the max nozzle temp for the filament. Still, that may not be enough.
As for the best filament clip, having tryed a few during the last decade, I myself am back with the ultimate, most flexible, heat resistant, very low profile (great for vac bag storage) and reusable clip I found to date. Works on any spool, doesn’t care how full the spool is and has multiple further useful applications: blue painters tape
I played with infill settings, and it came out pretty well, it’s now hard to break the clips with fingers, so that’s good enough. When I looked at my PLA picture, I noticed that the layers are actually already visibly separated, but they just stick together much better than PETG.
I also baked some new PETG clips afterwards at 100 degrees, and they got even stronger, though it was overkill in this case.
With PETG and multi part prints be aware of layer times!
Whenever I have to print many little things in PEGT I ramp up the nozzle temp a little bit.
And I tend to place the parts so that that seems are close together to avoid wasting travel time, does not always work but I keep trying LOL
For strong PETG prints you need a good calibration.
The stuff does not like to stick to anything really, so if the filament is not pushed and squeezed properly the heat can’t be transferred to the previous layer/wall.
If it then has to hit layers that already cooled down too much PETG can be like the worst filament ever…
For PETG I prefer to stay on the higher side of the usable print temperature and rather low on the speed if the parts are complex…
