A Tale of Two Pots

I've been testing out a fair bit of new filaments this year while building a portfolio of aesthetically appealing materials for on demand. my 3D printed home decor business: transforming living spaces through curated home decor collections from internationally renowned designers, 3D printed locally on demand with zero-waste --> www.on-dem.co (we print wherever you are).

Earlier this month, to bolster my assortment, I licensed the Embodied Ideas collection from Ales Boem , and started printing showroom samples.

So I loaded up a new spool of 15% White Pine filled PLA filament into the printer's "smart cabinet" and started to Boem's Hermes Planter... 5 hours and 120 grams later, this came out, obviously not what I was expecting.

My first hypothesis was airflow, where the AC might have been automatically switching on and off periodically, and somehow managed to cause uneven cooling at these specific layers, however on re-print with AC off, the same issue occured.

Frustrated, I restarted the print painstakingly looking at exactly what was happening on these specific layers as it was printing, and discovered the artefacts only happened when the printer was printing the filament from the outer most edge of the spool, as illustrated below, indicating that enough moisture had been absorbed at the outer edge to affect print quality.

So I unloaded the filament, ran it through my Drywise, set it to "generic PLA" and voilà problem solved and a perfect print (or as perfect as you can get wood filled filament to print).

About Drywise

Drywise is an in-line filament dryer that takes out the guesswork when 3D printing hygroscopic materials. The Drywise needs about 50 minutes to pre-treat your filament and bring it to the best printing conditions before 3D printing can start. An in-line drying design assures that long 3D prints will always be printed with consistent material dried to best printing conditions.

Read more about Drywise