Extremely brittle parts

[TheMaker]

Hey everyone,

Before I start, I want to say I am using S3D and Makergear Natural PLA, neither which have given me problems up to this point.

I've been printing fine until my recent prints, I have been experiencing some phenomenon which has been proven greatly frustrating. Last night, I was printing off a tool holder for my laser cutter that took around 3 hours. Everything was going great until I got to removing the part. Come to my surprise, the part felt much like Styrofoam in terms of how easily I could pinch it and leave an indentation. The outer shell lines are disconnected from the infill and hung loosely, and I felt with my finger and concluded that the infill was very rough in texture underneath the shell. I've been printing smaller parts to try to see what's up and have been tinkering with my settings, but nothing seems to work.

Any help would be appreciated. Perhaps someone could send me a profile that they regularly use on their M2 so I can try to diagnose this problem by process of elimination.

[jimc]

sounds like your underextruding quite a bit. this could be simply due to settings, filament tension or a clogged nozzle/hot end. you'll need to do some digging at this point to try and narrow that down.

[Vandal968]

Check that your nozzle is not partially clogged, it should extrude strait and thick,with no curling. If that is good, then check your extrusion multiplier. I recently started using someone else's settings for PETG and they included a very low multiplier (0.80) which gave me the exact symptoms that you're describing. Once I changed it back to 0.90 (the default BTW), it printed beautifully. HTH, c

[innkeeper]

i theory, chaining filament brands shouldn't change anything...the thing that does change brand to brand and even sometimes spool to spool is the actual diameter of the filament
are you measuring the width of your filament and then entering that into your slicer?

if not this can lead to over or under extrusion... as already pointed out this appears like under extrusion which can be caused by using thinner filament.

Another gotcha is not having enough overlap for infill... what is the overlap you have for infill...

[Bratag]

If this filament was printing fine and then stopped printing fine I would be looking at environmental changes.

Could the filament be moist? Did it suddenly get very cold where you are?

Both of those have affected my printing in the past.

[TheMaker]

Hey, everyone.

Figured it out after looking at the Extrusion Multiplier. It was set precariously low for some reason - I set it back to .85 and have been printing happy since.

Thanks for the input everyone.