I’m printing some change gears to check the fitment of the gear train on a banjo. I have been fighting with this particular brand of PETG trying to get a clean and accurate print since last week.
Notice on the 2 20T gears the poor bores and under extruded 5 layer top surface. They were printed with a hardened .40mm nozzle on a Bambu A1 Mini. They do NOT fit the spindles on the banjo at all.
Now look at the larger 80T gear. Clean teeth and bore with proper flow rate on the top surface. (Yes the infill is showing a bit due to the mere 3 top and bottom layers I printed it with to save on filament). This gear fits as it should right off the plate.
Same exact filament, same printer, same exact slicer setting. Just a hardened .60mm nozzle swapped for the hardened .40mm nozzle. And dried to 14%Rh for days and I printed directly for the dryer.
Soooo much time and filament wasted calibrating and recalibrating for that .40mm nozzle and it still failed. All I needed was the .60mm nozzle. But, still a new and interesting phenomenon to learn from for me.
There are filaments that do need to be dried before use or even dried as you use them. But they are higher end engineering filaments and they cost real money. You tend to need a real reason to buy them. Despite the fact that many consumer level printers have the ability to print them these days. $50 to $100+ a kilogram or less, is a real barrier to the wide use.
Still, years of experience has taught me that I need dry PETG as it tells me it needs to be dried, and TPU is always dried before use. But PLA is a waste of watts.