I have 2 rolls of Inland PETG that I have never been able to get a reliable print with so I just gave up on PETG. I now want to take another look at it. Was watching some videos on PETG and came across one by CHEP who said he could never get Inland PETG to print. I know some Inland filament is rebranded eSun but I don’t know about the PETG.
I know several of you here print almost exclusively with PETG so what are you recommendations?
If CHEP says he’s had trouble with Inland brand then it seems a no-brainer to try another brand. I guess the safest option would be to try a big name brand such as Polymaker. You can get some of it on Amazon.
Further to that, I have been printing, using my MicroSwiss all-metal direct drive extruder/hotend, @ 230C hotend. My bed is a PEI coated spring steel sheet @ 70C. I would start with a 30mm, 1 layer square, to ensure you’re getting a really good 1st layer.
And you know you can always post your results and those of us who do a lot of PETG will do what we can to help.
My Ender 5 is dedicated to printing PETG. I recently upgraded the heat break to a Slice bi-metal as I was “cooking” the ptfe tube at the nozzle end causing jams. For the stuff I am using now, I print at 237°C with a bed temp of 85°C on clean plain glass.
I get decent adhesion and if I let the bed cool below 30°C the prints pop right off with no effort, If I get in a hurry, have to scrape them off with the scrapper and hope I don’t pull some glass (yep, done that too).
My first recommendation is that you run a temp tower to determine the optimal temp for the material your running. I have found that it can change by a few degrees with each roll that I get.
Good luck and HTH
Our host has a video on printing PETG and in the past has recommended Sunlu PETG.
Cheers
Picked up a spool of Polymaker PETG had to print several test squares to get the Z-offset set, which I thought was odd as I have been printing PLA but using glue stick. After getting a nice 30x30 square I sliced and printed a spool plug. The 1st one came out bad, the outer layer line was coming loose and it was over all weak. After looking it over I decided I needed more infill and a little more temperature. Increased the temp to 240c and 20% infill and it printed fine.
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Being happy with the 2nd print I started the print which was the reason I bought some PETG in the first place. My wife has a decorated bowling ball that a friend of hers painted for her, which has since passed. It has rolled off the porch several times. So I decided to make a stand of it. I had already printed it in PLA as a proof of concept. It came out okay but had a couple of issues that the PLA version didn’t have. First the bridging didn’t come out as well as with PLA, there’s 3 slots under it to drain water. Supports would fix that over maybe a little more fan speed on bridging. The second issue is on the top layer(s) looks like it has elephants foot. If had this on the bottom layers but never on the top. It doesn’t take away from the functionality or the looks of the print really. In fact it almost looks like it could have been designed this way.
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That’s a pretty good 1st effort @Gramps. As far as the water drain slots are concerned, rather than trying to bridge that large of a space, I would have designed it as either a triangular opening, or an arch. Given the rather low height, I would probably have done a triangle.
Not sure about the layer expansion at the top. Are you using Cura? If so, check under Walls for Horizontal Expansion – see if any of the several options have non-zero values.
Could you post a photo of your 30mm square?
Thanks @Ender5r that’s a good tip on the triangles or arches for the water drain slots. It was sliced in Prusaslicer not sure if it has that option I’ll check. Never really seen that before.
Here’s the last 30x30 test square
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Thx for the photo. Have to say, that square looks pretty dang good. I do wonder if lowering the nozzle by 0.01 would make it even smoother. Since I believe you’re using Klipper, I guess that would involve increasing the value in the Do Not Touch section of printer.cfg. Nevertheless, congrats on getting your squares printing so well.
I printed it on the SV04 which still has Marlin, I think switching it to Klipper would take a lot of time and experimentation to get it all setup right. It’s printing pretty good right now and I don’t want to mess with it. As I recall I did lower the z-offset when the final final circle was printing. Thanks for all your help and suggestions, they are greatly appreciated.
I just hope that at least 1 turns out to be helpful.
Here’s the bowling ball sitting on it’s new stand
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I printed a golf ball and the earth and the moon but haven’t tried a bowling ball yet. Just joking. I need a couple of pedestals for mine. The moon turned out great but the earth I need to do with some texture for land area. I think I will redo the moon like a lithophane so that an interior light would give a positive image instead of negative.
Breakout the CAD program @roon4660 and start designing. The is my 2nd design the 1st was a bowl shape that the ball sat in but I think this one is better. It should scale easily for other size balls
We, my techie buddy and me, are exploring all sorts of things. I can now say my Ender 3 pro prints the TPU and the PETG I have perfectly or more than I thought I would get without some monkeying around. At this moment I am printing some PETG parts for an air driven motor. Who knows how that will turn out but the parts are printing like PLA. The results are better. I can feel now the difference between PLA and PETG.
I have my own designer. My buddy fixed my computer so that this aged thing goes like a rocket, now he’s always over here designing all kinds of things. I do not exaggerate when I say that he is completely hooked on 3d printing even though it’s just lately after he has watched me play with it since 2019.
Now that I’ve printed a few things with PETG I am beginning to wonder why even bother with PLA instead of PETG. It prints just as well for looks and is not more expensive in general and the physical properties are better.
