I am getting absolutely terrible surface finishes printing with the wood PLA. I’ve wasted half a spool on retrying a print due to this issue and I don’t even have a guess as to what could be wrong.
The settings are all the default for everything for the “0.18mm Balanced Quality” preset, I tried with and without ironing on the topmost surface (ironing kept having extruder overloaded errors and the ironed layers separated from the pieces, it was an even worse result than this), the printer is freshly re-calibrated on everything within the past 3 days, and I’ve gotten some really good prints out of it lately, but this is extremely disappointing:
If this were my Ender machine I’d have a few paths for resolution myself, but this is a stock Bambu Lab product with stock settings printing a very simple block, which from my understanding is exactly what I should be doing, and I’m still getting these awful results. Does anyone have any ideas why this would be happening and what I can do to fix it?
Is it really that much worse than regular PLA? I do not live in a very humid environment at all, the room the filament is stored in is typically 35% relative humidity. Granted, I did take it out of the drybox for a day not thinking it’d be that big of a deal, but I can leave my PETG out and about in that room for days with no consequences, I figured even with the wood the PLA would survive a day just fine
Yes I did, I’ve been 3D printing for quite a while now and I am unfortunately aware of that through experience. I did get a couple of good prints using it already, I combined it with gold Silk+ to print a sword handle for my wife with great results, it’s just been this exact print that’s been giving me issues and I previously assumed it was an extrusion issue of some kind. At this point I’m more surprised at just HOW hygroscopic it is as you can see from my comment above. I can leave my PETG out for days with no change in print quality, I’d logically assume that 24 hours out of the drybox for a PLA variant would have no issues at all, but I guess I didn’t give enough credit to how much the wood changed that.
I’m a big wood pla person but I have not run wood pla on my H2D yet. But that is a shame to run through that much wood pla to have negative results. I don’t know why you are getting that surface quality but some filament calibration may be in order.
I prefer OVV3D wood pla which has 30% walnut, cherry, or oak pulp. So I thought I’d mention it is the best wood pla in my opinion. I run at 200 for the first layer and 205 for all other layers. I never dry it because it comes so bone dry already. It’s available from Amazon for $30 a roll and looks and feels like wood. I use it on a .4 nozzle on my other Bambu machines.
I also have Bambu wood pla I bought just to try. Feels and looks like plastic wood. Bambu recommends drying it upon opening and I use the default Bambu wood profile with it. I think Bambu wood pla only has 10% wood pulp in it and is normally very easy to use even on a .4 nozzle.
I am curious at what temperatures bambu runs their wood PLA at because normally wood pla is run at a lower temperature.
I just finished my last spool of PLA Wood on the H2D with a 0.4 mm HF nozzle, and the print quality was identical to what I get from the X1 Carbon — possibly even slightly better on the H2D.
However, it does absorb moisture more quickly than PLA Basic.
I got some OVV3D 30% walnut wood PLA printing now on the H2D and it is printing the slats to 1/12 park benches. I’ve never seen them print this beautifully.
Below is from Bambu’s TDS for various filaments. Not sure if that is the problem you have (can’t really see the print quality from the pic), but they are not wrong. Wood PLA Hoovers up moisture, and summer can be a very humid season for some people.
Made this hammer for my kids to play with. It’s the Bambu Walnut pla with a wood grain modifier. And then it’s the silk+ Plus silver for the Hammer head. This was my first time ever printing with pla wood.
I’m wondering if some of your issue is using the 0.6 mm nozzle. I haven’t used mine yet but others have been saying that the print profiles are terrible. I dried the filament for 10 hours at 55° with the AMS2.
Here’s a wood table I printed out that came out great on the H2D. Also made the Bog Juice and the books were made on my mini. The hanging birdcage was made on the P1S. This is a 1/12 scale diorama and the figure is Mezco’s Woodford.
