So when I first put together my gMax I was getting reasonably flat prints with little warpage or curling on the corners. My first roll of PLA was a $45 roll of a "premium" USA made plastic that I had ordered online (for the life of me, I can't remember where now...). Since that first roll, I have been printing with $20 cheap PLA I have been picking up locally at MicroCenter and have been getting increasingly worse and worse prints. I'm experiencing extreme warping, prints that are shrinking beyond usable dimensions (one part I recently tried to print for my cousins CNC came out almost 4% smaller than the model it was printed from!)- all kids of oddities. It's almost ABS levels of shrinkage.
I kept thinking that my problems were running it to hot or to cold, not kicking in the fan at appropriate times, running with or without a box fan pointed at it, not getting good adherence to the bed, etc. And I have exhausted almost all efforts at tweaking for better prints. But this morning it occurred to me that it could just be the quality of the PLA causing the problems. I'm going to try to order a roll of Colorfabb or other "premium" PLA this weekend, but I wanted to see if anyone else had been experiencing this level of difference caused by shrinkage, and if so, if anyone has been able to directly pin-point it to the "quality" of the PLA?
- other chris
I kept thinking that my problems were running it to hot or to cold, not kicking in the fan at appropriate times, running with or without a box fan pointed at it, not getting good adherence to the bed, etc. And I have exhausted almost all efforts at tweaking for better prints. But this morning it occurred to me that it could just be the quality of the PLA causing the problems. I'm going to try to order a roll of Colorfabb or other "premium" PLA this weekend, but I wanted to see if anyone else had been experiencing this level of difference caused by shrinkage, and if so, if anyone has been able to directly pin-point it to the "quality" of the PLA?
- other chris