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E3D

Discussion in 'General Questions' started by Lance Weston, Jan 5, 2021.

  1. Lance Weston

    Lance Weston Active Member

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    Wanting to run USA filament I purchased a couple of Atomic rolls. I got stringing. I contacted Atomic and Mike suggested I move from 190C, the temp at which my Sunlu and eSun work well, to 210C. Still got stringing no matter what settings I used.

    Mike claims that Chinese E3D's do not work well and melt the plastic inside causing the retraction suction to not function.

    I use solid stainless throats, a dual ball bearing high speed fan., and an oiler. It sounds like he is blowing smoke, but things are never simple. Does anyone have any thoughts.
     
  2. mark tomlinson

    mark tomlinson ༼ つ ◕_ ◕ ༽つ
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    Stringing is usually a sign for PLA/ABS that you are too hot, not too cold.
    For PET/PETT/Nylon stringing is possibly too cold (particularly for nylon).
    In any case more retraction will help.

    If not then likely you have a bum spool. I can't speak for Atomic quality (never used them) when just testing/printing non-important stuff I use cheap filament, but when performance is critical I use the good stuff (Taulman, ColorFabb, etc)
     
  3. Lance Weston

    Lance Weston Active Member

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    I went through the logical steps: 4 days in the dehydrator first. I just substituted the Atomic for the eSun that was running good parts since it had matching temp range. I got stringing at 190C and Atomic told me to raise temp to 210. I did and the played the temp up and down, still stringing. Too bad, I wanted a USA source.

    I tried starting a conversation on filaments on the forum but it seems nobody is interested. (Taulman, ColorFabb, etc) is the first time I got info on higher quality filament. Would like a more complete list.
     
  4. mark tomlinson

    mark tomlinson ༼ つ ◕_ ◕ ༽つ
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    I have never had wet filament cause stringing, but that is just my experience.

    As far as top quality filaments are concerned -- this is my (subjective) list in no particular order:

    ColorFabb
    Taulman (more for the specialty ones, but none of theirs are bad)
    ProtoPasta
    Filamentum
    SunLu
    Hatchbox

    ColorFabb and Taulman are top of the list IMHO simply because none of theirs disappoint and I use Taulman a lot for their Nylons and other non-PLA filament types (Alloy910 for example). They have the best nylon filaments period.
     
  5. Lance Weston

    Lance Weston Active Member

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  6. Lance Weston

    Lance Weston Active Member

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    My testing of lots of filament gave me these in order of quality:

    Sunlu
    eSun
    Hatchbox

    So we share some filaments. eSun can be had for cheap at Walmart, the sell it under Bison3D but all of the rolls arriving are eSun and I have 8 rolls on backorder. I was not happy with the Sunlu price hikes during Covid. I found that the Sunlu PLA gave me better results than their PLA+.

    Sunlu requires a week in the dehydrator. I feed the filament out of a dehydrator and decided to see how long it would take to get a good finish. I took it out of the bag and printed a couple of parts. Each day I would print another couple of parts. By the fourth day it was looking pretty good. At the end of a week I had great parts and no longer was getting any improvement.

    eSun is good out of the box and so is Hatchbox.
     
    #6 Lance Weston, Jan 6, 2021
    Last edited: Jan 6, 2021
    mark tomlinson likes this.

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