PLA Filament shelf life?

[Mick @mickc My Robox is a Blue Commercial Version]

Hi

I have recently bought 3 reels of CEL PLA from Element14 in Australia, and all 3 seem to have issues when trying to print compared to the same material from other resellers.

These issues include the filament starting to slip after around 20 minutes of printing, most times after nozzle cooling and resuming it will print for another 20-30 minutes and slip again, other times i need to eject the filament, cut a few meters off and reload, then resume. Also there are times it seems to melt almost to a liquid state, even though the nozzle temp remains constant. This causes weak layers in the print.

I don’t have any of these issues when using the CEL PLA reels from other resellers, it just seems to be the ones from Element 14, also ABS reels from Element14 are printing fine.

My printer has a new extruder and a new bowden cable & head power cable assembly, so there are no issues with the extruder.

The boxes are quite dusty so i’m wondering if they are just really old? Does PLA have a shelf life?

The reels were sealed in the bags with the silica gel, and the vaccum was still present when opening them.

One other thing i notice with these reels compared to others is that the filament is wound onto the reel quite messily, where the others are neat and follow a pattern.

Is there any way to know the manufacture date from the label on the box? i have attached a photo just in case.

 

Thanks for any advice,

 

Mick

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[Pete @pete I have both RoboxDual and other Robox versions CEL HQ Bristol UK]

Element14 purchased a lot of stock from very early batches. We are not aware of a problem with early PLA but there is a possibility it has something wrong with it.

The most common will be moisture content. You may notice a popping sound as moisture boils away in the nozzles. Try heating the nozzles and feeding filament through an open nozzle.

M104 will heat the nozzle to the reel temperature (M104 s0 will turn it off) allow them to heat before going to the next step.

Open the nozzle and press the +5 or +20 filament feed buttons on the reel and listen for popping.

You can try to dry the filament. There are a lot of information about this online. In our office we use colour indicating silica balls which change colour when they have absorbed moisture. They can be reset by microwaving them.

For official support please visit www.cel-robox.com/support/ and create a ticket

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