This makes me feel better about how I store my pla

I headed up a NASA study regarding using 3D printing in space. One of our findings was that ABS and Nylon filaments did not create a measurable amount of particulates when extruded if they were desiccated to 25% RH prior to using them. They put off large amounts of particulates when stored at 50% RH then extruded. That's a great reason by itself to dry your filaments. Regarding strength... I've found that prints using several year old Zortrax ABS filament are more brittle and delaminate much easier even though print quality is the same.

I have experienced the PLA cracking issue too. Especially with 3mm diameter PLA. My best guess is that it gradually forms to the tight coil shape of the spool. Then unwinding the filament generates stress cracks on the inside of the coil shape. To solve this on the 3mm filament I made a small resistive heater tube that the filament passed through just as it came off the spool during printing. The tube was about 25mm long. This heated the filament to about 65 degrees C and slightly softened it, allowing it to straighten out without forming cracks. It also prevented the feed tube from coiling up.

"Its difficult for me to quantify if the print is actually gonna be any stronger now, since i'm not CNC kitchen" HAHAHA

Angus, as always, another great video. I look forward to all of your videos for their helpfulness. To the point, I was able to rescue a very brittle spool of PLA with my dehydrator. Here's how: I have a temperature controlled Rosewill Food Dehydrator. Rather than sacrificing the trays, I found out a clear Better Homes & Gardens Round Cake Carrier fits the dehydrator perfectly. I drilled a 15mm hole in the top of the carrier for ventilation. The Rosewill keeps fairly accurate temps. I had a spool of PLA that was so brittle it was impossible to use. Having nothing to lose, I put the spool in the dehydrator at 45c for 4-5 hours (per the PrintDry website). The unusable spool of PLA returned to a perfectly pliable spool that I was able to use through to the very end. The brittle spool was stored in the open air. I live in Vegas, so you would not think humidity would be a problem. But since then, I am a firm believer in keeping my spools dry. Now I store all my spools in large tubs with desiccant. I haven't had a brittleness problem since.

Hi Angus. I really enjoy your videos as they are well made and very informative. In the past I worked with a Markforged desktop printer. The machine is known for printing in nylon and allowing you to embed continuous fiber (glass, carbon or Kevlar) in the print. When you purchase the printer it comes with a Pelican brand watertight box that is connected to the print head with a tube. The filament comes sealed in a vacuum bag with desiccant pouch or two. The filament then lives in the Pelican box with the desiccant pouches and stays sealed in the tube till extrusion. The machine lays down a healthy purge line between prints unless it has been sitting for a while. Then the purge line gets really heavy. As far as strength of wet vs dry nylon. Wet nylon tends to be stronger than dry. In injection molding the nylon is dried so you can mold it then it is allowed to absorb moisture to gain strength. Some shops even place newly molded parts in a bag with some water to accelerate the process.

If you don't want to destroy the bottoms of the food dehydrator (3:24) you can also use a microwave lid instead. In my case the microwave lid from IKEA called Prickig just fits perfect! It has a diameter of 26cm, my food dehydrator has 25,6cm.

Always the shiz'ouk' Angus - TY for taking the time out with this stuff. I came home with a simple used food dehydrator over the summer, and just found my plug-in lamp adjustable lamp dimmer to make use of with it [the food dehydrator] as night, as... ...the default [single-setting ON/OFF switch] took things to the level of "a lil' to toasty" for my white Chromatica PLA. ;) Getting a cheap handheld IR thermometer will serve one well also with these extra cheap food dehydrators. Excellent and very empowering content as always - thank you for your time and effort you put forth.

Interesting results Angus. I've dried TPU with excellent results. I generally print it directly from the dryer like you did. If I can find before and after pics I'll tag you on twitter with the comparison. I've dried PLA at a lower temperature and had decent results as well but it didn't get near as soft as yours either. Thanks for sharing!

Great insight Angus. I bought a food dehydrator last year, specifically for drying filament .... never needed to use it yet. But I do like to be prepared 👍

Excellent. Bought myself a cheap dehydrator a couple of weeks ago just for drying PETG. Didn't know it was a "thing" ..... much better to be lucky than good!

Another good tip for cheap filament drying is 'crystal kitty litter'. Its just silica gel desiccant, but much, MUCH cheaper than buying packets off eBay.

Thanks to your video, I used a food dehydrator to dry out some really bad PLA. The result: all but one reel revived perfectly; my oldest filament got better, but is still unusable due to bad layer adhesion. Thanks for saving almost all of my filament!

Thankyou for this video, it really cleared things up for me! We have loads of old donated filament spools at our new Makerspace (here in Adelaide), nice to know we won't need to dehydrate most of them!

Thanks for the vid, great info as always. I did my own testing last year with an ALDI dehydrator and had very similar results to you. I also live in Australia, so we would have similar environmental conditions. I came to the same conclusion that PLA, ABS & ASA do not need to be dried. Nyon absolutely needs to be dried and PETG can definitely benefit from drying. I found that TPU seemed to also benefit from drying and exhibited less stringing and a better print surface. I also just looked at an old spool of clear PLA and it also snaps easily and has hairline cracks in it.

We've had a wet spring in 2023 in the south of the US. My new roll of eSun white PLA sat on the printer for 3 weeks and started snapping like spaghetti. I have a dehydrator from back in the 90's with no thermostat but airflow is right at 115 degrees. Amazing how a $12 appliance kept all these years is back in service.

Great job, informative video. This makes nylon seem more encouraging! As you noticed, PC has a pretty insane bonding strength (unlike ABS), but like ABS it wants to pull off the bed from the thermal stresses. I use the textured build sheet on the Prusa with Magigoo PC (Prusa doesn't recommend putting anything on this sheet but there is no way around it here). For anything bigger than 5 inches or so I put the Prusa in a pop-up photo tent. I prefer PCMAX (now called Polymax PC), I haven't done pure PC on the Prusa. You would probably need an enclosure more often with pure PC just due to the higher print temperatures increasing the stress. Some settings: Bed at 110C, chamber temp around 38C. Fan off but you can use 10-15% for bridges and for autocooling with smaller parts. Perimeter width 2x nozzle diameter, 1.5x for outside perimeters, only print with 0.15mm layer height. Also I'll use makerbot's old "helper disks" to drop on any corners in the slicer to keep them down (0.3mm thick). Ref. Github user metacollin's PC settings, except use 0.15mm layer height: gist.github.com/metacollin/18ecb0a58fb475cfae86e0781bf51325

It's definitely worth the investment for something with a proper variable temp control! Definitely impressed with the results either way!

I got back into 3d printing after about a 6 year break. Started printing with some PLA that i got when i got my first printer without doing anything to the filament. Worked perfectly

I have the temp controlled dryer and live in a high humidity environment. This thing has saved me so much filament. PLA & PETG especially.

time to wait for cnc kitchen to make a comment

You helped me out in the 3-D printing hobby so much and I love the shirt

Incidentally I went through troubleshooting my petg prints this week. They all seemed to delaminate and break very easily. I tried different temps, cooling etc. What worked was drying the filament in a dehydrator for about 7 hours. After that the parts are not brittle but more plyable and strong. Perfectly matches your results with the octopus leg breaking off. Great vid!

I think the PLA snapping is related to moisture. I’ve left two roles if pla in a cabinet for a few months a while back, one in a bag with Silica gel, and one without. The one in the bag didn’t break, the one without the bag did

About 2ish years back, I, for some reason, bought a half kilo roll for a 3d pen I've used maybe used twice. It's been sitting in the bag it came in a locker ever since. Can't wait to try and use it

Hi Angus, that was a pretty nice test of the topic. I think one thing that would help for the issues you had drying PLA is a temperature controlled dehydrator. As you mentioned, the PLA was damaged by overheating, and conversely some materials might actually need higher temperatures. I've had very good results drying PLA that was causing massive stringing (Hatchbox wood PLA) and while not completely eliminated, drying turned a spool that was basically unprintable into one that gave good results. Principles for plastics drying are the same as in injection molding, though typically don't cause as much problem in extrusion for 3D printing since the visual quality of FFF printing normally can't reach the quality of molding. I want to do some more moisture testing at work, though it takes quite a bit of plastic to get a good test result (about 50 grams). I have done one test on a spool of ABS left out for months in ambient and moisture content went from 0.9% down to about 0.1% after drying, and made a good improvement in print quality. For molding, typical ABS recommended moisture level is around 0.02%.

Angus I love your videos you’ve inspired me so much to 3D print so much stuff

Was very impressed with the change in PETG, great video must have taken ages!

I grab a roll of PLA out of the shed the other day that had been sitting open for 5years. I took the top layer off to get rid of most of the dust then made a quick filament sweeper. And it printed like magic

I haven't had any issues with my PLA, either. Other than it sometimes snapping if left out for months. My PETG starts to print okay and then the stringing gets worse throughout each print. I've started keeping those in dry boxes and might get a cheap dehydrator now. Thanks, Angus!

Great video, I appreciate the effort. It'd be interesting for you to try desiccant as a followup on the PLA since heating seemed to mess it up.

I found the same . I live in Queensland where it humid as hell and never had to dry anything, (abs and pla used). The rolls are only 2-3 years old but still work!!

Living in the low humidity of Alaska, and storing my filament rolls out of direct sunlight, (because we do have more than 16hrs of it for months), this also makes me feel better about how and where my PLA is stored.

Just used a 5 year old spool of Natural ABS a few days ago that I had recently dehydrated but never used and it was the best print I have ever had in ABS. I was testing the SKR V1.3 and Marlin 2.0 and due to 32bit controllers never pausing everything was the smoothest I have ever seen for 0.2mm layer height. I was floored.

Back up from the dust - Great video and information Muse

I bought a cheap one from Amazon (sold under multiple names, including Rosewill, Flexzion, Eastman Outdoors, etc.) that has a basic temperature control. In fact, there's a company called PrintDry that sells the EXACT SAME unit for a lot more money; their main selling point is that they include custom trays instead of the plastic grates. I just used the same trick of cutting out the grates from all but one of the trays, and it works really well. If you really wanted the custom trays you could buy the dryer from Amazon and the custom trays from PrintDry and you'd save some money AND have the original food drying trays if you ever wanted them. :)

i had a roll of pla that spent the most of its time in the south high humidity. after 5 years its printed wonderfully.

Useful video. I was having issues with an (old) filament spool I tried to use, and a web search told me filament expires in 2 years. I decided to do some research. My other spool was clearly bad for whatever reason, but others that were as old seem to be doing fine. Dunno.

Congratulations on 500K! Also, great video.

I use a portable room dehydrator and stick it in a small closet or sometimes a large cardboard box and leave it running set to minimum humidity for about five hours with the filament sitting on the ground next to it. This technique worked like a treat with my stringy petg and pla. The air gets to around 100F or about 38C by an hour in.

I had a roll of PLA in the basement 4 years and then in attic for 2 more years, just took it out and put it over the radiator for 24 h, and got amazing reults.

I got loads lying around, must be around 5 years old by now, I used it now and it is not great but it is still work without breaking the filaments. It is very fragile, I just put it in the oven just an hour around 40-50C and filament strength it before I put it in my 3d printer. My 3d printer is Nereus from Tevo.

I have 7 year old Octave brand ABS and it still prints fine on my Afinia H479. Stored in a Sterilite storage container with a loose fitting lid. Not airtight by any stretch. So I agree and see the same results with ABS.

The food dehydrator works for sure. I just bought a brand new roll of armadillo TPU. It came with one tiny little dry pack. When I put it on my printer it was spitting and popping and full of moisture. One overnight in my dehydrator and it was like butta

I also mentioned PLA to snap after the print if its a bit older or was exposed to moisture or normal environment without putting it into a bag or something. Seems to be normal. It stopped after i dried it 1h in the oven at 50°C.

I had a roll of clear PLA that sat in an outdoor storage facility for 13 years in the heat and humidity of Dallas, TX...it printed perfectly.

I use my oven to dry multiple roles of PLA all the time 1.75 mm @ 150 degrees F and never had an issue. Love the vids, keep it up!

Thank you CHAMPION! I am beginner, and love you videos.

I had my PLA-rolls and printer in the same area as my washing-machine and my PLA started snapping off after just a few weeks. Now i store them in a plastic container with some silica-gel and they work just fine. So i guess moisture from my washing-machine was the issue here tho. Love your videos, so keep up the good work. :)

PLA can crystalize over time which leads to the snapping. When it's heated it crystalizes as well. I also have some rolls from 2013 of 3mm filament (with dyes) that I've gotten bad print quality with on my fixer upper printer from 2012.

I do dry my filament. I have numerous comparison tests where I took PLA that was stringing a lot and dried it, and it does wonders. I have a dehydrator that has a temperature control, so it makes it easier. It makes a real big change for fiber filled PLAs. I don't print a lot in PETG (but IIRC, it doesn't really absorb moisture). PLA doesn't absorb much moisture, but I still have gotten better results out of drying it then not. No experience with any of the other materials you tried (though I should run my Taulman PCTPE through it). I also have a dry box that I run the filament out of, so that helps. I will agree on the time. I have read or heard people drying filament for 12, 24, even 48 hours. I don't think I've run anything for longer then 8 hours, and that was because I forgot I had it running. Results were better then pre-dry, but never seen a real difference between 3-5 hours vs. 12/24 hours.

I use a larger oven-style dehydrator with temperature control, and have found it helps a lot with PLA and PETG. Not a ton of difference in quality, but better surfaces and way less smell.

Great write up mate, i retract my earlier statements at robowars! My issue with the pla was definitely the snapping off at the extruder.

Thanks for the videos! You earned my sub, since all the videos I have seen so far are well done and have been very helpful. I like your experiments like this one. Keep them coming! Cheers

I'm still using up some old MakerBot PLA filament from back in 2012, no problem. It has gotten very brittle, but prints just fine, the prusa MMU2S does tend to break it at the intake on a regular basis.

Just got into 3-D. Have a ANKERMAKE. Also have a Harvest Right Freeze-Dryer. Was planning on Giving all Colors needed for a project an Overnight in The Vacuum Chamber at Circa 200 milliTorr, and 100F. Then, as needed, Bring out whichever Reel I needed.

My PLA definitely is negatively affected by humidity!! No question! I can hear it crackle going through the nozzle and it gets a bit more stringy when printed, with a bunch of zits on the print surface. The filament is also MUCH more brittle before printing!! (which seems antithetical that humidity would make it more brittle rather than mushy) I've improved it BOTH with "active drying" (I used a convection oven) AND using plenty of rechargeable desiccant over several days in a sealed dry box getting the humidity down to 10%.

In my experience, drying PLA at 45C works wonders. I keep rechargable dessicant packs in a cabinet where I store my PLA and rotate those out every week or so to recharge them (they have a wall plug built into them to dry out the dessicant). It's worth noting that where I live, the summer air gets to about 50% humidity. In the winter it's more like 15%-18% so I don't worry about it as much. But PLA that's left out gets brittle and I have lots more issues with it than when I try it out ahead of time. Same with the PETG as Angus found here. Drying out PETG the day before I use it works wonders.

I have been printing on 2014 filament for a few months. I got it with 2 Printrbot Plus Metals and am having no problems with it. It's mostly PLA. I have not dried it and it was stored in a basement without any protection from moisture.

Hi Angus...at first..thanks for all the good videos. Keep up the good work :) ... to the topic.... if you don´t want to spend money on a filament dryer you can put the filament in your oven at 60-70 degrees celcius for around half an hour. Does a pretty good job in my experience.

Glad to see you back. I thought you'd given up on YT!

yes, it is good at least in 4 years as I have an old roll of Ultimaker PC and tested it even without drying and the result is perfect using Ultimaker S5

I've been drying PLA in the oven, using a thermometer to keep an eye on the *actual* temperature. It basically needs to be on the lowest setting, and even then it will still overshoot initially. So: turn the oven on, wait for the temperature to stabilize *below* the glass transition temp of your material. And keep an eye on it. Don't leave it on the spool! Separate it from the spool, place it on something flat! The material shrinks and will tighten up on the spool.

Awesome video, and well-timed for me. I was just going through all of my old filament and wondering if any of it was usable. One roll of cheap transparent PLA definitely wasn't though. I thought it was water damage but after seeing the warped roll from the dehydrator and my general knowledge of how hot it gets in my shed in summer, I dare say I need to keep it indoors. #Australia

That's good to hear I have a 2014 ABS spool in the cupboard and have been wondering about its viability.

I've had improvement with petg and pla drying. Nylon and tpu are required. I dry everything from new and keep it all in a dessicant box with 4 spool holders in it. Works great! You definitely need a temp controlled dehydrator though (I paid $35 for mine)

I've seen the filament snapping issue with our Taz 6. After 2 consecutive successful prints with a brand new spool of matter hackers PLA (3mm) I came back to broken filament. It also happened with a fairly new spool of ABS as well, also from matter hackers. The printer is next to a big window and the humidity here is pretty intense. I printed a strain relief that fit on the top of the extruder that holds the PTFE tubing.

I used to work in a plastics plant where we made PP closures and PET bottles. The PP went straight from the hopper to the extruder, but the PET we had material dryers that we would wait at least 4 hours on before we started making bottles. The reason fo it is that PET is very susceptible to moisture and the plastic would cloud badly (in our transparent bottle) and delaminate even though it was injection molded. The clouding was very apparent in our particular bottles because they were stretch blow molded which increased strength. Heck , even our air compressors had systems in place to make sure the air we blew the bottles with was as dry as possible

hey there. long time lurker. i figured i would chime in. im a injection molding process tech RJG cert. generally speaking ....ABS/nylon/acrylic/PET/PBT/Polyurethane/polycarb need to be dried before extrusion or molding which in this case your extruding them. defects can vary from delamination. bubbling. brittle materials and many others depending on how your using the materials. good rule of thumb is to look at your MDS for each of those materials and they can tell you what temp and for how long and what % the moisture content should be for use.

i use a dehydrator that i got for £20 delivered that has temp settings, it makes a massive difference to my pla, i have to dry it at a lower temp over a longer period but its well worth the effort, i also use it for drying pellets before extrusion into filament.

I keep my filament in plastic boxes with the OEM silica gell. I periodically bake the silica gel at 200 F for a couple of hours. This keeps the filament nice and dry. As I buy more filament, I get more silica gel packs and I just keep adding them.

I've only had 3 filaments benefit from drying. An unknown brown PLA, a name brand pink PLA and nylon grass trimmer cord. Each puffed and sputtered before drying.

drying my pla at 55 degrees c (just before it softens) saved my prints... MANY times. same for my tpu.

I want to see Angus's channel surpass one million subscribers. Going for gold mate.

I would say it's worth paying the extra for a dehydrator with temperature control, typically these won't be much more but give you a much greater range of control over time/temp settings. Mine works from 30c - 90c and having a built in timer is a really nice feature if you do ever want to use it for its normal (food based) purpose!

Just was talking to a guy at work about this yesterday. My 3D printer from 2016 (wanhao i3 v2) came with a spool of see through yellow PLA filament which I love but I’ve had so many failed prints recently and as you mention the snapping mid print but only started recently. I put it down to age

I just bought a dehydrator myself. It works.. I`ve had a hard time printing wet ish PETG and no success with non-dried nylon. once dried, The PETG prints perfect, and the nylon well,.. turns out the printer is the problem.... Drying some pla also made it less brittle and bubbly.. definately a must do for older PLA. I used the Printdry temperatures as a guide, and so far so good (except for nylon. stupid nylon. and printer!)

Interesting results. I think you must live in a dryer climate than I do. I always place my opened rolls of filament in ziplock bags with desiccant. My experience in my climate: PLA: Will get brittle if left out for a couple of weeks. PETG: Will extrude stringy with lots of blobs after a couple of weeks in the open. I now print straight from a filament dryer and life is better :-)

I actually have rols that break from sitting on the shelf. I do think it pulls moisture but it starts at the cut end and works its way up from my experience. I usually bend the end till i get 3 bends in about a 6 inch stretch that does not break.

💕💕 Loved this video !!! And I don't even 3-D print ! 😄 Nice job !!! 👍👍👍👏👏👏

I have always printed PA straight from the dryer. Other filaments that I appreciate being printed straight from the dryer include: Igus J260, PC, and Ninjaflex

I had excellent results drying PETG and Nylon at around 80 deg C. And ABS at around 70. I had two rolls of PLA that were cracking and over night at 50 degree didn't solve the issues. They printed OK but kept cracking.

youre the man. ive been having exactly this problem this week

Wow, congrats on 500k subscribers!

Well done Angus - thanks!

Excellent work! This sums up a lot of useful info!

I’ve been using same dehydrator since over 2 years now and it works great for me. I heat PLA at 45c if I am keeping it overnight and at 50c if I am heating it for few hours. The problem I observed with PLA and PETG is after drying as it is coming back to room temperature, it becomes more absorbent and hence, I put it in a closed box with a lot of silica gel first and then use it for printing once it’s back to room temperature. But yes this dehydrator consumes loads of electricity

I have been printing with HIPS for the past year moving from ABS on my P802M, though still printing PLA on my Tronxy X1. For a case or stationary object, HIPS is fine for many things and it is light weight compared to ABS and others. But it is a weak material. I tried to build a Toy RepRap 3D Printer with it, and when 98% done, I gave it my first test: The printer literally shook itself apart! HIPS - High Impact Poly Styrene is the same Styrofoam material in car bumpers and other things, it is a bit stronger than its sister material Styrofoam used in shipping items and holding your hot coffee in that white Styrofoam cup from the local deli. So... all the mounting holes on the 3D Printed parts elongated as the printer moved back and forth. HIPS is great for a lot of things but not for moving parts like a 3D Printer. So I'm rebuilding the printer with ABS Parts. Other than that, it is a great material to work with.

we have some really old filament spool at university / on abs roll (tested what it is with a lighter) lost a lot of its color when printed after 7 years but the interesting was when the guy who ordered it came into the makerspace and said "cool this is still printable ? and it is glow in the dark ABS btw .." no wear at the nozzle on a mk3s and before it killed one nozzle after an other on a ultimaker.

Finding life in an ancient material; your shirt is quite fitting.

I have found PLA to become fragile when left in the air for a few months. I have successfully recovered the flexibility by putting it into a PrintDry container (basically Tupperware that you can attach a hand vacuum pump) along with a 8-12 5g desiccant packets, about a month later along with a few packet change outs once the color changed (get the ones you can microwave to reuse). The PLA printed like new, and I could bend it without cracking.

In had one of my PLA rolls closed tightly in a bag with all the leftover gel bags u get witth the filaments, some 14+ bags, when i finnally used it again it broke in about 10cm pieces every time i tried to unroll it. I let it sit on a shelf in the open for 4 days time and it was back to normal.

Awesome video Angus! One filament I would really like to know a little more about is PVA. I've just gotten into dual extrusion and I am having a lot of fun with PVA supports, but I can see I am getting a lot of moisture steaming out from my hot end when using PVA. Can you please try removing the moisture from some PVA and let us know how you go? Would be greatly appreciated! Keep up the great work!

I got several Kg of 5 and 6 year old filaments, several brands the ones that seems to have no issue are the Colorfabb PLA and XT ones, the matterhackers PLA was almost unusable, Got to put it in the oven a few minutes every time I want to use it, it's brittle and breaks easily... the thing I manage to print are mostly test prints and experiments. The Flashforge ABS is just like new and the Nylon and Ninjaflex are like new, All these were in a closed with silica and zipbags. My result are cheap PLA goes bad, expensive or non generic ones are good.

Angus, great video. Here in australia the whole filament drying thing is a bit less relevant because of our climate, with the exception of Nylon.

I find that drying is effective for Nylon and PETG. With Nylon the moisture issue is obvious - as seen (steam, bubbles, popping). For PETG it can at times be less obvious that there is a moisture issue. It can manifest itself in ways that look like there is a printer issue - from 'chalky' colouring to blobs and stringing to poor first layers and inter-layer adhesion. 10-12 hours in the dehydrator and everything 'magically' gets fixed. BTW - the PrintDry dehydrator is really excellent for this.

Funny thing with PLA breaking is i had one brand that would break if left in the tube overnight and even when i stripped it out of the tube and fed it through the retaining holes on the spool it would snap there but a different brand wouldn’t break at all . The brand that broke had a gloss finish on the filament where the other brand was a matt finish but gave a much shinier finish on the printed part - work that one out !

I've got new PLA that is brittle and snaps, and I've also got some 5 year old PLA that hasn't been sealed, sitting in a shed, and prints as good as it ever did.

Angus, what timing. I'm sitting here looking at a dehydrator my cousin gave me. I print mostly in petg and our air is slightly humid. I have to get to cutting those trays! Thank you!

I need to dry my PLA fairly often. and it makes a massive difference. I get blobs and stringing galore and the filament begins breaking when feeding into the machine. after drying all issues are solved. i live in a fairly mild area no crazy humidity