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A while a go I thought that I could try printing in Nylon on my Wanhao Duplicator i3 with full metal hotend. Boy, was I wrong: The filament was not dry and popped like foam. The platform (Buildtak) was not sticking at all (at any temperature), I had the cooling fan at 100 %, so the bits that stuck to the platform warped like the Enterprise. I learned that a filament dryer, an enclosure, Gaolite and PVA glue will be my friends, but I am determined to not spend a lot of money to printing something that I don't need often. (PLA works fine for me)

I am now at the point that I dry my filament by leaving a roll of nylon on the heated buildplatform at 90 °C. It stopped popping and hissing, so I guess that works. I learned that nylon sticks to cellulose, so without needing to recalibrate I can tape a piece of printer paper to the build platform and it sticks like crazy! Extra bonus is that if it warps, the paper curls up slightly and keeps the print from falling off. I have only printed a single test piece until now, so I can't really say if it's to be recommended.

Has anybody used these methods (drying nylon on heated build surface and printing nylon on paper) too and have you found any downsides?

To make this a worthy stackoverflow question: "Can I dry nylon on my heated build platform and print nylon on paper?"

0scar
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Hacky
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    This question would probably be a better fit for this site if you factored it as a "how to...?" question part followed by a self-answer, and also considered other answers before accepting your own. – R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE Feb 25 '20 at 13:13
  • The two topics (drying and adhesion) are quite different. They belong to different questions. – FarO Apr 30 '20 at 14:12

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Heating spools on the bed can be an option, but it seems inefficient to me: you lose a lot of heat and an oven would save quite some energy. Also, I wonder whether the open air will reduce the effectiveness even more, since the outer parts and the top of the spool will be colder.

FarO
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