Problem solved feeding filament..

[The Hat]

Now that I’m back printing a few projects, I decided to upgrade my Sunlu filament heated boxes, there’re great as a one off filament box but have a tendency to get pulled over if the filament on a roll is wound to tight. (This often happens)

I decided to have the filament come out the top of the box instead of the front, so if the filament snags then the weight of the filament roll is enough to free it quickly and allows the filament to continue.


The filament snags on the side of the reel and needs a good tug sometimes to continue feeding freely and that’s a problem for me when I’m not there to supervise the print operation all the times.

I use the single filament boxes for the one off jobs that don’t need more than one roll of filament and I'm only using one printer at a time, otherwise I use the multi roll filament boxes.



I also glued a bracket on the bottom so I could secure it to the bench to stop the box from falling over if the filament was having feeding issues, and so far so good this seems to have cure all of the problems..

 

[Artur5]

Nice design with bearings too. Not even Mr. Murphy could come in and spoil your party .

I experienced too that problem with the filament snapping inside my Esun Box, which was dragged and fell sideways. Of course, when that happened I wasn’t there to come to the rescue and the print was ruined.

For the time being, I’m not printing anymore with the spool inside the drying box. If a thread gets entangled, and the spool is not in that box, you can always disentangle a few coils every few minutes to get the job going. If it’s inside the box, you can’t free it, unless you stop the printer, cut the filament remove the spool from the dryer, disentangle, reload the filament, resume printing... a real PITA.
In my experience, if the spools of filament are stored in a sealed bag/box with desiccant, it keeps dry enough and doesn’t gives problems with oozing or bubbling when you print, provided the job lasts only a few hours. That goes for PLA, PETg and even for TPU. Other stuff more hygroscopic (nylon ) is a different story, but I’m not printing nylon right now.

Anyway, the best remedy against this issue is to purchase only reliable brands with 99% guarantee of perfectly winded spools. In that sense, Prusa, Fillamentum or Geetech, have been faultless so far. Other Chinese brands are more of a gamble and a big name like Polymaker has been really disappointing. Polyknots should be named.

 

[The Hat]

Anyway, the best remedy against this issue is to purchase only reliable brands with 99% guarantee of perfectly winded spools

I’ve not had any filament break or was broken on the spool for a long time, and then it was only the once with a bad roll from Real the Dutch company, they apologised and gave me a new reel, but never explained how it happened.

All my filament is from Creality from Poland, @ €19 a roll and it’s been perfect ever since I’ve used it for my standard lamp, which was finished more than 12 months ago, I changed a setting in my Slicer on the nozzle size, I use point 5 nozzle on the printers and set the slicer to point 4, works a threat.

P.S. I’ve not had no breaks in any filament rolls from China.. That's well over a hundred..

 

[Nifty]

Wow, excellent design / prints. Great job @The Hat

Anyway, the best remedy against this issue is to purchase only reliable brands with 99% guarantee of perfectly winded spools.

I've got a bad habit of getting really junky / cheap filament. Most of the time it works ok, but a couple of times I've had stuff that just causes more problems than I should need to be dealing with.

I recently purchased some filament which ended up being my very first spool of perfectly clean-wound filament... every single stand exactly aligned perfectly, one to another. I felt so bougey.