I’ve been printed some articulated lizards, octupus, and dragons for friends and had a request to print one “relatively small” As I shrank the model size I noticed that I get a lot of stringing on the articulated parts. Specifically this really shows up on dragons which have the pointy ends to their top surfaces.
Can anyone point me in the direction of what settings might need adjust to increase retraction or slow print speeds so the retraction has time to be effective?
Thanks!
You need to make sure your filament is dry. If you have confirmed that, you can try increasing the “retract distance” a bit, like in 0.5mm steps. But anything more than around 3mm of retraction is useless. So if you don’t get the desired results at 3mm, and the filament has been really dried (like, 24 hours in a dryer), the only thing left for you to try is the hot-end. And if that doesn’t do it, the filament is just not good enough.
A bit of really fine “gossamer” stringing can be easily cleaned up with a high power blow dryer, or by quickly passing the threads through a flame like from a candle.
Higher travel speed might help a little, too, if for some reason it’s been dialed down for this print.
I have the filament in question in the drier now! I’m also trying the same print, same setting, with a different PLA to see if it strings. If it doesn’t I’d say the filament soaking moisture might have been the issue.
Will see how this goes tomorrow once I dry it out.
Ran 16 hours at 55C in the drier and it appears to be printing better now. Looking into my sons’ room it appears he has a number of spools open, which are surely soaking up moisture from the air.
With that in mind I spent $30 for the vacuum bags so once we run them through the drier we can seal them up and not have to worry again (or at least worry much less).
The challenge to all this of course will be getting a 12 year old boy to take initiative and clean up after his prints.
I’ve refrained from vacuum bagging because there aren’t a lot of positive posts about those resealable bags actually working all that well. Vacuum drying is by far the best method for drying - fast and extremely effective. But vacuum storing maybe not so good… I don’t bother trying to keep all my filament dry. I just put it in the dryer for 24 hours when I am planning to print. That way, I know for certain the filament is reasonably well dried regardless of how I stored it…