this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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Crappy filament? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 days ago by idunnololz@lemmy.world to c/3dprinting@lemmy.world
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Not sure if anyone has seen this before but I bought two spools of PETG from Elegoo, one in white and one in black. Their regular PETG, not the rapid one.

Yesterday I printed with the white spool and it worked pretty well.

Today I tried to print with the black spool and the filament would not come out of the nozzle. I tried diagnosing the problem and ended up swapping nozzles, taking apart the nextruder and putting it back together. Then I tried printing again and again the filament would not come out. I swapped back to the white filament because at this point I've essentially ruled everything out except the filament and the white filament worked. I then tried the black again and it would not print. I cut off about 10cm of the filament and tried again and same issue. Finally I cut off about another 50cm and now it started to print.

I'm not sure if this has happened to anyone else or if anyone knows what the issue is. It's almost as if the filament refused to melt or had an much higher melting point vs the rest of the spool.

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[–] BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Sounds like it was just a small section of incorrectly mixed (possibly contaminated) filament at either the beginning or end of a production batch. When they start mixing the plastics there can be some irregularities in the flow of materials and you get a bit more of one thing and a bit less of another. That's normally cut away and discarded once everything is flowing correctly. Sometimes it's missed or they didn't cut enough.

I'd consider it a one off, or very rare incident, and not a general overall quality issue unless it starts happening regularly.

[–] idunnololz@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Yeah. The good news is after cutting off the problematic part of the spool, the rest of it has been printing very nicely and I'm already halfway done the spool.

[–] chrastecky@phpc.social 7 points 3 days ago (3 children)

@idunnololz Elegoo PETG is simply horrible, never again. It surprised me a bit given how awesome their PLA is.

[–] SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago

PETG really is variable from suppliers. It ranges from easy as PLA to unprintable.

[–] idunnololz@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Will try a different brand once I'm done this spool. The weird thing is the white filament was perfectly fine. Maybe just some impurities or something.

[–] shads@lemy.lol 2 points 3 days ago

Not sure how my experience stacks up but I have been getting performance equivalent to the Bambu PETG out of the Elegoo I have been buying recently on my P1S. A little bit of stringing but that seems to have a lot to do with recent humidity as a pass through the filament dryer has been rectifying it. Just ran 2 rolls of the Red PETG Rapid through for my mates packout accessories, and before that I did a bunch of cleats for his tool wall in some Black PETG.

Did a good enough job that he rather kindly bought his wife a P1S for her birthday when the Black Friday sales hit. She has turned that around and run the printer non-stop since it arrived and only about 40% of that has been prints for him. 😆

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

If you still have the length of filament you cut off, you can verify your temperature theory pretty easily by loading it up temporarily and trying increasing nozzle temperatures until you get it to extrude. That spool of filament may have been contaminated by having a couple of pellets of the wrong stuff in it. Plain PET (rather than PETG) is most likely, I think, and that stuff won't extrude until you wind your nozzle up to probably about 240° C.

It might have been a diameter issue as well, but I'd doubt it. My printer's drive gears can still grab objects that are quite a bit smaller than the prescribed 1.75mm filament diameter, and if the stuff were so thin or thick it wouldn't feed I think it'd be quite obvious to the naked eye. I imagine this is the case with pretty much any modern printer.

[–] idunnololz@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I was using Prusa's default profile for PETG which heats the nozzle up to 250 C. If you are correct about it being PET, it should still have melted.

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

In that case who knows what it was. This is one of those rare instances where it'd be awesome to have a flame spectrometer.

[–] IMALlama@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Way back when there was an American filament company that sold... very reasonably priced filament that actually printed well. As they got more popular they couldn't keep up with demand and it seemed like they started cutting corners. This resulted in their filament not having a consistent diameter as well as the occasional foreign object in the filament (a bit of charred plastic?), which lead to jams for many of us. They ultimately went out of business due to their reputation of struggling to fill orders and inconsistent quality.

If you still have the chunk of filament you cut off and also have some calipers I suggest measuring the end that you were trying to feed into your extruder. You could have had a physical clog, especially if your extruder was clicking.

[–] idunnololz@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I do not have a caliper unfortunately but I do have one arriving in the mail in a week or so. I realized I needed one once I started trying to design things with a tight fit.

[–] IMALlama@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Very nice! Welcome to the joys of designing and making functional parts. I suggest doing two things:

  1. Print, or buy, some radius gauges
  2. Make some test parts to understand how your filament and printer behave. For example, materials like ASA will shrink. I've also found that outer dimensions are much more true to CAD than inner dimensions, especially for things like smaller diameter holes for threads. Some text prints will help you figure out what input results in a given output
[–] Damage@feddit.it 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah that seems like a temperature issue. Have you tried increasing it 15-20°C?

[–] idunnololz@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

The weird thing is that it prints fine now. Since I've fixed the issue I've sent over 3 jobs to the printer and all 3 printed mostly fine. Some stringing but it's PETG so somewhat expected. It was just that first 10 or so cm of filament that just refused to melt. So weird...

[–] Test_Tickles@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I wonder if the end of the spool got annealed somehow? Maybe while being spooled? Or if it was at the end of a run it could have spent too much time in the extruder?

[–] idunnololz@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

It was a brand new spool so the extruder idea is probably out. Also I tried cutting 10cm off of it which should be long enough that it would be too far away from the extruder anyways. I was also using Prusa's default profile which heats the nozzle to 250 C! Anyways I'm glad I figured it out. Next time I suspect a nozzle clog though I'm going to try swapping the filament as well before I do something major like take apart the extruder.