Hi all, I have bought a second hand Creality Ender 5 pro. So far so good. I checked the belts, tightened the bolts (where needed) and successfully ran it for a week before deciding "you know what this printer needs? Klipper firmware." So off I went and installed Klipper.
Ran though all the requisite calibrations, so now the extruder extrudes 50 mm (+/- about 0.2mm) when I ask it to, my calibration cubes measure exactly 20 x 20 x 20 mm with less than 0.1mm deviation. PID tuning for hot end and the bed. But the stringing. The stringing!
The filament is 3DJake ecoPLA that I opened two weeks ago.
See picture attached (and apologies for miswriting the ^2, I had misremembered). Temperature, retraction, it doesn't matter. With stock firmware the retraction worked well at around 4.5mm retraction at 40mm/s. I can't get the stringing to stop here at like 80mm/s and 8mm of retraction and I am at my wits end.
I would greatly appreciate any pointers you guys might have for me!
Have you used this same filament from this manufacturer before and had different results?
Polymer blends vary wildly between manufacturers and there are all kinds of additives used to adjust the thermal & mechanical properties of the material. Even the dye used can affect the way the plastic behaves. Most PLA filaments on the market are not actually 100% PLA because the resulting products tend to be brittle and fragile, so various adjusted PLA blends have become more popular. There are a lot of options for plasticizers that can be added, and there is absolutely no standardization between manufacturers of which ones get used or in what ratios they are added to the base PLA.
This is not really good enough. Every material is different, even the same PLA blend from the same manufacturer but in a different color might need different settings to get good results.