Looking at filament dryers and thinking about the faff element. Really I want to just get on and print whenever I feel like it with whatever filament I want. So to have to dry filament for 8 hours before is not ideal. Drying and keeping them in a box with desiccant works up to a point but still isn’t ideal. So I thought why not a real time dryer. I thought I’d post on here for you learned types (i.e. not me) to shot holes in my idea. Using PLA. If a 1kg roll contains about 335m of filament and lets say you want to super dry it (excessively) so you stick it in the dryer for 10 hours. That means all things being equal it would take 2 minutes per meter roughly. If the max print speed is 3 meters per minute then a six meter route between the spool and the print head would mean a 2 minute per meter transition time. If this route was a pipe with 50 degrees dry air whizzing through then the filament could be wet one spool end and dry the other. I would guess you could probably halve that route and it would still be ok. The drying would actually be a lot more efficient as well as you wouldn’t be trying to dry through layers and can get 360 degree surface access and 10 hours is way over the top (normally). What do you think ? Am I way off ?
You’re attempting to birth a baby in one month by hiring nine mothers. I’m not sure the material process scales in that direction. While you 100% will get better and faster results due to pulling the spaghetti away from the spool and it gets full surface area contact, but i’m not sure it is capturing the full story of using heat to coerce vapor pressure evaporation of water in polymers. I’d be interested to see if you get condensate in your PTFE line post-dryer.
I think you will get good results simply from racking a spool of undry PLA in your dryer, pulling the noodle out and printing directly from the filament dryer. Your first 5 grams is in the PTFE lines and not drying, but after that it probably will be noticably improved, even only 15mins later. PLA is super forgiving. My instinct tells me this won’t help you for the truly hydroscopic spaghetti types out there, but you can try.
This is already a thing, it’s called inline filament dryer. They are very expensive (my first google hit was like €3000 which didn’t even include a needed(?) preheater for another €500).
There’s absolutely no reason you shouldn’t try to build one and please share your results!