Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is not my experience. PETG should be utterly problem free, super fast to print and has a much lower fraction of failed prints due to various adhesion issues. The big trick is to make sure the filament is dry, if it is not you will be in for a world of trouble. But properly used prints will last much longer, and are mechanically (much) stronger. On top of all that we can buy PETG in bulk for about a third of the price of PLA.

For functional parts I would not use anything else until there is a really good reason (such as high temperature stability or more strength for a given weight or cross section). I've gone through multiple tons of the stuff now (3500 Kg in total or so) on 85 printers (Bambu's (43), Creality (22) K1s and Prusas (20)), consistency between batches is very good though from brand to brand there can be some notable differences.

If you have stringing and globbing problems with PETG my first guess would be that the filament profile that you are using is subtly off for that particular brand of PETG and/or that the filament wasn't dry.

Calling PETG "utterly problem free" is quite a stretch lol. PLA is pretty objectively much easier to print than PETG, and perhaps than all the popular filament types out there, especially if you are trying to print anything where precision/detail matters. .

PETG is just oozier and stickier by default, so stringiness is almost guaranteed to happen, bridging at a greater risk of failure, etc. It is tougher, so unless you have a printer that can use multiple filaments on the same print, removing supports is more difficult.

Can you reduce these factors by tuning your 3D printer - yes, a bit. But that's not "utterly problem free".

PLA is the plug and play of the 3D printing world right now.

When you print objects with 10's of printers 'tuning your 3D printer' is no longer an option other than to tune it to be 'in spec' You can only tune your designs and the profile for your filament and for a particular model of printer but then all of those have to be close to identical. As soon as you start tweaking your design or filament profile to offset possible issues with the printer you've lost reproducibility.

Incidentally, a lot of the stuff on thingiverse and other similar sites suffers from those kind of issues. They are tuned for PLA on a particular printer without realizing it.

The real question is - did you buy 10s of printers because you needed them for the business, or did you start the business to buy 10s of printers :P

I bought one, to try out some ideas, then it sat on the shelf for about a year, then suddenly there were five and so on.

I have a few shelves that got populated with things in a very similar fashion...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com