You’re on the right path my friend by asking these kinds of questions and soliciting feedback.
When I first was exposed to 3D printing in my professional life, it was very, vrery expensive and we usually outsourced the print. It was well over five years ago that I had actual use of a resin printer and later an FDM printer(Makerbot). I elected at that time to leave those problems with my engineers at the office, let them deal with the headaches. In truth, as much as I am a tikerer, the technology was still too much of a science project and I knew I would not have the time or willingness to spend the money to get it to work properly.
However, I deeply wanted to at some point bring that capability back to my home office where I could tinker with my own ideas devoid of customer deadlines. The out-of-box experience of the X1 at one of my clients really convinced me to bring one home but I opted for the lower cost P1P because if I was wrong, I didn’t want to have the buyer’s remorse and have the expensive paperweight sitting on my desk. In short, Bambulab enabled me to dive into this as a hobby at home.
You are already finding out what it took me a long time to realize. To people outside of our hobby, I explain 3D printing like this:
Although it is technology it has more in common with baking food than engineering
- Ingredients(i.e. filaments)
- Time
- Temperature(extrusion, build plate and chamber)
- Technique - in baking a cake, the shape of the size and shape of the pan is critical to how it cooks. In 3D printing, the orientation of the model and how it’s placed on the plate, affects the outcome.
None of these factors have hard engineering metrology associated with them that you can simply dial-in. And as the majority of the posts here will indicated, there is a whole lot of “Kentucky Windage” applied when printing a complicated model.
So to answer your question, “which is the best…[Fill in Blank]” the answer is based on too many variable to declare which apple pie ingredients will win the contest at the the state fair. In other words, you will have to experiment with different filaments and settings getting towards that “golden” parameter that works for that build. All I can say is that the lower the extrusion temp, the faster the vitrification(liquid back to solid) and lower stringing one will experience.
That being said, PLA is called the “easiest” filament to print with because it is so forgiving. That is unless you want strength, outdoor worthiness or precision. Then just about every other filament is better than PLA in each of those solitary categories.
If you haven’t already looked at it, don’t overlook the Bambulab interactive filament guide. At the top you select the filaments you wish to compare and it will generate a decent comparison table. Even though I have experience, I find it an indispensable tool often confer with this guide to remind myself the difference between parameters. I even keep a hard copy next to my printer because I simply cannot remember all the properties of each filament.
The longer the molten filament has to travel through open air the more gravity will want to pull it down. I’m afraid you won’t be able to get much in the way of improvement if any. You may want to prove this out for yourself. Not to waste filament but if I were the curious type, I would cut this model right where you see the stringing and then use that as my test object. Then try to first print it in PLA which is likely to be your easiest print. If you can’t do this in PLA, then you definitely won’t do it in PETG. The only thing this exorcize will prove is that it can’t be done but at least you’ll know the limitations.