Printing PETG on an Ender 3

Alright, so Tech Nervous here guys. I've been seeing a lot of people having trouble printing PETG on their Ender-3. So I'm going to give you my profile real quick which is basically my PLA profile with a higher temperature. I'm going to give you a rundown of a few things and we're going to run a couple quick prints just to show you how easy it is to get it to adhere to the bed. Today I'm going to be running one on PEI and one on the magnetic mat. I did want to show you, now this is some filament stop CA filament I got from a filibox and I did really enjoy their PETG even though I wasn't really a fan of their PLA. It says right here nozzle temperature 200-240, that's a pretty broad range. First thing I want to point out that most people don't know is running on your Ender-3 the nozzle is actually on average 5-8 degrees cooler than the thermistor says it is. They have cheap thermistors, it's not a problem, it's just something that we need to adjust for. So normally when running a PETG, in fact when running most filaments, I tend to start at the high end which is the opposite of what most people will tell you. But if you look this actual filament up and get their recommendations for printing it on the website, it will tell you to turn it up as high as you can and then slowly turn it down until you don't see any burning. By which I mean turn it down until you don't see any browning or discoloration. Now I have had this printing on what my Ender says is 255, it's probably a little bit closer to 245-250 but I haven't seen any browning. I did turn it down and I was printing right in that 235-240 range. But with the PETG it is a harder plastic and it does require a higher temperature so even if you see a lower number there, go ahead and start at the higher temperature and then just kind of dial it back through your print until you find the proper temperature. Another good thing to do is to print a temperature tower, although with PETG you're going to need a specific temperature tower for these temperatures and you're going to want the tower to start printing at higher than your lowest possible temperature. So you're probably going to want to start at about 210-215 just to get that first layer to adhere properly and then you can drop it down and it will adhere to itself better than it adheres to the bed. So let's jump over to Cura real quick. We'll throw a model on and I'll show you my settings for this and then we'll get one stuck to the bed real quick to kind of give you an idea of what's going on. Alright, so I chose this piece because it has a pretty broad bottom. We aren't going to put any sort of brim on there or anything. So just so you can see that I don't have any peeling or curling or lifting on any part of this. PETG is a tricky one. You can easily print it with or without cooling. Depending on the actual plastic itself, there's advantages to having it on and off. I am going to leave mine on for this first print, then we will turn it off for the second print and we'll just do a little comparison so you can kind of see the difference. But let's go in here. I need to check out. Everything's looking pretty good. I'm going to change my printing temperature to 245 because I can dial it back from there. I'm going to leave my build plate at 55. That's not super high, but it's not really needed. The PETG shouldn't warp on you like ABS does, so it shouldn't pull away from the bed once you have it adhering. The problem is getting it hot enough coming out of the nozzle to actually stick to the bed. We'll show you that in just a minute. Like I said, I'm going to run on a PEI sheet and then I'm also going to run one on a magnetic bed. We'll use two different PETG filaments. That way you can see that it's not just the filament that's working really well, it's the process. So the only thing I've changed is my temperature. I do need to go down here. I want to make sure my brim is turned off, put a skirt there and we're not going to need tree support. So I'm going to go ahead and slice this. I need to make sure that my, yep, we are hooked up, we are preheating. And actually right now I have a roll of PLA in there. So I'm going to change that out, get this PETG on there real quick. All right, I've got it all heated up. First things first, I just switched filaments and I didn't just switch filament brands, I switched filament types. We're using a completely different kind of plastic. It was PLA, now it's PETG. And in order to ensure that we get our best bed adhesion possible, what we need to do is purge the remaining PLA from the nozzle. So there will still be a little bit of residual plastic in there. You can see some of it melting out. The reason that it is bubbling out like that is because my temperature is way too high for PLA because we're going to be printing PETG. Now you want to do this, also when you switch back to PLA from PETG and you're going to want to make sure that you do it at a higher temperature so that that PETG is pushed out of there and you don't create a worse clog. So I'm going to go to prepare, move axis, move one millimeter, extruder, and I'm just going to extrude and you should see it start coming out here in a second. There we go. Still coming out black, that's that PLA. We'll see in a little bit here it should start to change this nice seafoam green color. There you can see it starting to change color. I want to make sure that it's all one color, so I'm going to let it quit extruding. I extruded about 30 millimeters I believe, which is a little excessive, but I want to make sure that that's clear. Now that that's done, I am going to hit my print button and we'll get started on a print and I'll show you how well it adheres to the bed. Now my hot end's heated up, it's at 245 like I said, the bed's heating up to 55 right now like we said it. It's at about 40 degrees, but I wanted to show you this oozing real quick. This is one of the ways I can tell that I do have the temperature up too high at the moment, so I'm going to crank it down to 240 as the print gets started here, and I'm going to do that now by simply going to control, temperature, nozzle. You want to keep an eye on this because any time you change the temperature values before the G-code actually starts running the model, there is a possibility that it will change it to whatever you had set it in Kira when it starts running, so if you have a different initial layer temperature than your starting hot end temperature, it is going to jump on you. Right now you can see it's at 240, 55. We're about 6 degrees away from the bed heating, and it's sitting right where I want it to as far as temperature. I'm going to hold this right here for just a second. It should only take about another 30 seconds to heat up to 55 degrees, and then not only are we going to watch it put down our purge line, but I want to make sure that the temperature doesn't jump back up. Yep, and there it goes. It jumped back up to 245 already, so I'm going to go back in here, control. Now that I do this the second time, once it's already sent that initial code to the G-code to set the temperature, I shouldn't have to do this again unless I have post-processing scripts on that will change the temperature. So 239, that should do. You're going to see our first line go down here. This is going to be a purge line. This is essential to make sure that your filament is flowing properly. Oh man, don't mind my messy, messy machine here. Definitely need to do a little dusting, but watch this now. It's not going to stick immediately, and this is a perfect demonstration of why you want a purge line. See, it's pushing it out. It's curling up around the nozzle. If you give it just a second, it will grab. There you go. It starts putting it down, and all right, so you can see it's printing, and now here we go down onto the bed. Okay, this is PEI. Like I said, I enjoy the PEI. This surface is as smooth as glass, and you can get anything to stick to it. So the only filament I've tried that hasn't stuck to this was a really weird filament from Taulman called T-Glass. Really awesome filament, but I did have to get the blue painter's tape for that. Other than that, this bed works for everything. I can show you ... Oh, we got a little bit of stringing there. I'm going to turn it down about another five degrees here. I can show you as well in a minute here that it works just as well on the magnetic mat. I'm going to turn this down like I said I was, and then we're going to go ahead and let this print finish. We'll come back in a minute, and I will show you how to get it to adhere to the other bed as well. Just real quick, I did want to show you that it is going down without a hitch. I'm not having any problems, and once again, like I said, we'll come back and we'll check on the model when it's complete, and before I remove it from the bed and we switch to the other sheet. All right, so I'm still going down pretty well. I have dropped my temperature to 231 all together, and I'm starting to see a little bit of dusting back there, and that is indicative that it's cooling really fast, really rapidly. At this point, I'm going to go ahead and shut my fan off, and that should give me a lot smoother print. All right, so I'm going to go to control, no, excuse me, tune, fan speed, and just dial it down to zero. So you can see my fan here when I click this in, almost there, it will shut off here shortly, and I just heard it. You can see it slowing down. Pretty dusty. I clean that thing pretty regularly, so don't yell at me. But you can see that now the newer lines that it's putting down don't really have that whitening artifact, and they should come out a lot smoother. All right, so there you have it, my PETG Stormtrooper bookmark. You can see it's not perfect. I do need to adjust my flow rate because I'm getting a little bit of overextrusion, but it did come out nice and smooth, adhered to the bed really well, it's dimensionally accurate, and I could easily turn on ironing and adjust my flow rate and smooth this out quite a bit. So I am going to switch over to the magnetic mat and show you that it will adhere just as well following the same principles, so give me just a second. All right, using this old mat's just like coming home for me. This thing is used and abused. I haven't put it on here in a while because the PEI works so well I haven't needed to change it. So we'll go ahead and start a print on here. You can see it's kind of messy. I'm not even going to bother cleaning it because I really don't use this mat too often. I just want to show you that using the right properties, you can get the PETG to adhere to pretty much anything. All right, there she is, my nasty, dirty old ender mat. This thing is used and abused. It has old filament stuck to it, it is marred, scarred, tore up. It is not the flattest surface. It has fingerprints and dust all over it, and my PETG is still adhering to it. Let that be a testament to the fact that temperature is the major issue here, okay? When I say that, what I mean is I always start at the higher range of temperatures. Look at that, it immediately... Of course I have a level bed. I don't level it every time, okay? But it's just... It's that simple. I mean, it just goes right down. So we're running at 240 right now, and I have the fan turned off, okay? So I'm going to let this go. We'll let it print for a little bit, we'll come back, we'll check it out, and I'm pretty sure we're going to have two successful PETG prints, both off of the PEI sheet and the Ender Magnetic Matte. Yeah, look how disgusting that bed is, guys. If it'll adhere to this, it'll adhere to anything, and I literally mean anything. You just need to have the right temperature. A lot of people tell you with filament to start off on the low end and work your way up, and I'm here to tell you that that is not the case, okay? Start at the high end and realize that, like I said, the hot end of your Ender 3 is generally five to eight degrees cooler than your thermistor is saying it is. So even though I'm printing at 240, right now I'm probably closer to 230, and everything is going down well over the top of fingerprints, dust, crap, and all sorts of other gunk on this dirty, dirty mat. All right, and here you have my PETG model going down just fine on my Ender 3 mat. You can see it's not peeling up anywhere, the adhesion is fine. Again, I have the fan off, and the temperature is super high. So those are my recommendations for printing PETG with the Ender 3. If you have any other tips or tricks, go ahead and leave them down in the comments. If you have any questions or are having any issues getting this to work, go ahead and drop me a line down in the comments because I do always try to respond, and I'll try to get you up and running. So just let me know. All right, real quick, I just wanted to throw on at the end here, this is a base I'm printing in base mode. This is scaled down to 50%, so it is rather small, but it is printing really nicely. I have the temperature set at 240, and we are printing a one-perimeter thick wall, and it is going down gorgeously and adhering to the bed just fine. So this, again, is printed on the PEI. I highly recommend getting a sheet of PEI. A lot of people recommend glass. This has a lot of the same properties, but you can't break it and cut yourself. So the point is definitely raise your temperature. That's going to be the best way to get your PETG to adhere to whatever surface you're printing on. If you cannot get it to stick to the Ender 3 magnetic mat, go ahead and lay down some painter's tape. It'll stick to that for sure. And as always, guys, I am Technivorous. Thanks for watching this video. Don't forget to hit the like button. You can subscribe right here by clicking on the icon, and I put a couple videos up in the corner. One of them is going to be my latest video, my latest upload, and the other one is going to be what YouTube recommends for you, so feel free to check those out. Don't forget to hit that bell for notifications down below, and we'll see you guys next time.