PLA barely sticking to previous layers



  • New maker looking for help. I finally got my first printer last month, a Jumpstart. Started with Matter control 1.5. went through setup and leveling everything went great. The first 3 prints went good with just a little of the spider web artifacts that I had read about. Then it started leaving little blobs in the walls of my prints and more of the strings everywhere. About this time Matter control 1.6 came out so i upgraded. Now I am having issues with the filament not sticking to previous lines. I tried raising the temp to 210C thinking maybe it wasn't getting hot enough but I read that others do fine with the temp at 190C. I tried to lower the filament multiplier to .995 when I read that the strings are a result of extra filament. Then it failed completely. About 25-30 layers in a string of the filament peeled up when the extruder head moved on and on the next pass it caught on the nozzle and just bunched up like a wad of chewing gum on the end of the nozzle. I am in Hawaii and it is very humid so I thought the humidity might have gotten to the filament but it doesn't seem to match with the symptoms I read about in other posts about humidity. I have even uninstalled matter controil and went back to 1.5 it is still not sticking properly. The base layer seems to stick to the tape just fine but the layers don't stick to each other.



  • Its very unusual for PLA to have bad layer adhesion. There's really only two things that can cause this. Either the temperature is too low, or there is something wrong with the filament itself. I would try increasing the temperature up to 220 or 225. If possible, it would also be helpful if you could test a different spool of filament. That would tell us if the problem is with the printer or with that particular spool.



  • I only have the matter hackers pro spool of filament that came with the printer right now but I am going to order another to give it a try. How hot is too hot for PLA? I will try 220 on the next print. Thanks for the response



  • 225 is as hot as I would go with PLA. The risk is that the filament will carbonize and clog up the hot end. Do not let it sit for long at high temperatures.



  • I set it for 220 but after I started the print it reset to 205. It took me a bit to figure out how to change the preset so it would stay at 220 when I started the print. I also ordered a new spool so I will be able to test that in a few days. I did bake the filament this weekend just in case the humidity was a factor. It seems like it might have been because the print that wouldn't change the temp came out much better than it had been last week. I will compare that with the one at 220 and see if that gets better.


Log in to reply
 

Looks like your connection to MatterHackers Community was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.