I recently acquired a 1 kg roll of white Village Plastics PLA, and no matter what I do, I can’t keep it from grinding. At best, I’ve gotten maybe half an inch of extrusion before it stops extruding. I’ve tried priming the extruder, running some cleaning filament through, disabling retraction, increasing temp up to 210, and lowering the print speed, but it seems to have little to no effect. The atomic pull didn’t seem to do much either. I have used their filaments before (blew through a full five lb. reel of ABS like 2 or 3 weeks after getting my TAZ 5), and the roll of Polymaker PLA that I have on right now is printing just fine. Anyone else having this problem? Possible solutions?
Hi
Measure your Village PLA with a pretty good digital caliper.
I’ll bet that it will be oval in shape and one dimension will be larger than about 3.1mm.
If so, that will not fit the bore hole at the extruder entry point.
Near the bottom of the spool, another thing that happens is that the material could be formed to tightly to the spool.
Warming the PLA to about 90degrees F will help it straighten out as it leaves the spool.
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I’ve seen things like that, but not with any of the Village materials I run in my printer.
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Just some thoughts for you to consider.
I cut off about a foot long piece this morning and took measurements at .5 inch intervals. Lowest I got was 2.84mm, and the highest was 3.00 exactly. The filament looked fairly round, but I’m not 100% sure how oval it would be if it were off. One thing I did notice is that this filament seems to be VERY tight to the spool. The Bowden tube is fairly substantially curved to try and accommodate it. Not sure if this is normal or not.
Regarding the ABS issue, I ran probably about half a meter of the eSun cleaning filament though the extruder before starting with the PLA and performed half-a-dozen or so atomic pulls with the cleaning filament before starting with the PLA.