Moisture in Filament?

I've been using Makergeek's PLA for awhile with pretty good results until I saw the attached print. I am guessing the change in color is due to moisture in the filament. I had only left the roll out for less than a week, but I don't think its been overly humid (we did have one good rain during the week.) Has anyone else had this kind of experience with their filament?

hmm strange , moisture would couse gaps in layers and poping sounds during printing

It would look like this:[3dprint.com]

That isn't moisture, that is burnt material mixing with the filament. Disassemble your hotend and extruder and give it a complete cleanup.

How hot are you printing at?

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Blue Ice

blog at [contemporarymaker.com]

This print was at 210^o C. I print any lower and first layer is spotty. I have my heated bed at 55^o C. I have another roll of blue from same company and I can print it at about 200^o C no problem. Unless I had a LOT of burnt material in there I doubt that is the problem. I was printing all the x-axis plastic pieces for a prusa i3, so about an 8 hour print. The darker reddish color is where the print started. The lighter red is the later layers. Every single printed piece had the same issues at about the same height.

I contacted makergeeks about the issue just to see what they would say. It seems like they are as perplexed as I am, but their first question was hotend temperature. This is a print of the same material a few days prior with the exact same temperature settings.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/01/2015 01:36PM by dbrewski.

210 is kinda high though... hmm

I second greggo... 210 seems way too high. I print at around 185 C, and even that seems a bit too hot at times. Perhaps your filament colorant is thermally decomposing?

Can you explain more about the first layer being spotty?

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Blue Ice

blog at [contemporarymaker.com]

It is probably too high of temperature, but I do not agree that it is the primary cause. 185 is the sweet spot for most PLAs. It is not burnt material, but the material could be decomposing.... but I think it would need longer to cook. Lighter colors tend to darken and brown, yellow for my white filament. And I'm not seeing the behavior I've seen on my machine. Also, By "spotty", I think that is a reference to incomplete layer fill. Like "dotting" on calibration pieces.

I think it might be more reasonable that some other colorant/dirt/chaff or something was loaded into the machine or an improper color feed occurred. Pondering it for a bit, do you have more of the filament and is it still exhibiting the problem? You should be able to visually check the material and see if it is discolored going into the extruder. If it is - the filament is most likely to be blamed. This could happen from a clogged color mixture resulting in improper and unequal color over the print - and likely this would be isolated from others.

From the picture it seems like the color issue "resolved itself" at the end of the print. Unless you printed it upside down... the end of the print matches the vase color from before and the beginning was discolored to begin with - getting very severe after about 30-35 layers in and started resolving itself by layer 55. Then the last half of the print seems to be normal and unless I am mistaken - others should be from now on.