I have heard that moisture absorption by your filament can cause poor prints
I added this cookie tin to my enclosure:
The filament is inside with some descant. I hope this keeps the filament dry even for long prints, or if I forget to dismount it.
The filament is inside with some descant. I hope this keeps the filament dry even for long prints, or if I forget to dismount it.
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Nice idea!
Yeah the moisture will affect the filament, some material like nylon almost require something like you have set up there.
Alot of times i open a filament and its already wet when i first go to use it from the factory, so i dehydrate them with a food dehydrator and then i store all of them in these air tight bins i bought 
MooseJuice: You say you often open a new reel of filament and âitâs already wetâ. I have a few reels (still sealed) waiting for my SM350 to arrive. How do you tell if itâs already wet? From other posts, I understand that moisture absorption can be a real problem that I would like to avoid. Can you tell just by âfeelâ? Or do you use some type of moisture meter? Thanks!
If you print with it, youâll know its wet. It leaves funny crumbs and stuff and a terrible finish.
I have a filament swatch I made to print for each spool, its a 18 minute print wtih full infill and I use it to mainly keep samples of colors. It has a little spot for a label and a hole in it to string them all together.
First thing I do is print a swatch, and if it comes out crummy its wet. The top surface is so rough and bumpy that you cant apply a label if its wet.
Simple Color Swatch by MooseJuice1983 - Thingiverse
Just a little habit i got into when i started to realize how many spools I hadâŠ
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that is a GREAT question! there are lots of ways to tell, some better then others and all depend on how much effort you want to put into it.
you can test the filament, by bending it. when PLA gets very waterlogged it becomes brittle, so if it snaps or cracks easily it is to wet.
you can test the desiccant that is included with the filament, if weigh it and then put it in the oven and dry it out then weigh it again you can calculate the amount of water was removed. if the desiccant was holding lots of water, then your filament is holding lots of water.
lastly you can do as @MooseJuice said and print with it. it becomes clear very quickly if there is to much water as it will not print nearly as well. in the worst case you can even hear âpoppingâ (almost like rise crispies in milk).
hope that helps!
-Atom
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Thanks guys! Great advice! I have downloaded MooseJuiceâs swatch and can hardly wait to get my machine (itâs been shipped).
aww
do yourself a favor and buy a spool of filament from amazon or something, dont use the black pla that comes in the box. nearly everyone has issues with it. and it can ruin your print sheet. for some reason people are still receiving it although they know it was an issue, i think the packages must be prepacked to an extent or something.
the material from their store to buy separately is okay, but its not necessary to use their brand.
what you want is 1.75 mm PLA, amazon basics is fine to start with or hatchbox.
Thanks for the tip! What I have is two from SMâs store (black and white), silk silver from Mchyi, and silk gold from CC3D.
I see.
The store should be OK.
Those will be fine for now, be warned silk pla is a little weird, tends to need more heat, has a harder / more brittle feel to it and strings like a bitch. it does look very nice though
i use it sometimes too
for now thats a good start, eventually i think youll start wanting to try some better brands like prusament but when you are just starting out thats the way to go
priline brand is cheap stuff that i like a lot, i got some bright orange, purple and 2 types of wood pla of theirs 
The cookie tin seems to work well. I have modified it a bit now for maximum effectiveness. I found that some filaments experienced a bit of friction, so I replaced the tube with a Teflon one and made a low friction spool hub. Now there is very little resistance pulling any type of filament in.
I left a spool of PETG on the machine for a few days while I was working on the next print job. I really messed up the filament. I could hear the popping of the water boiling in the extruder and could see the bubbles in extruded filament. Only the exposed filament was affected and the stuff in the can was still good.
The divisions are .5mm and you can see the bubbles that formed in the middle of the filament.
I picked up a few of these vacuum bags that are designed for textiles, and they seem to be working well for filament as well. Iâve only been at this a couple of weeks, but theoretically this should keep everything dry. Nice thing with the big bags is being able to get a few rolls in each pretty easily.
Yea thats a good way, you should stuff in one of those silica gel packs in each spool middle too
i personally have some big airtight containers with rechargable silica dehumidifyers and some cheap little gauges i got like 5 for 10 bucks or something so i can keep an eye on things
lots of ways to accomplish the goal
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