White PLA problems

[katapault]

I have been having problems trying to get white PLA to give me any kind of acceptable result. I bought 2 reels of material which arrived well sealed, so should have no moisture contamination, but as you can see from the photos the same part with no changes to the program printed great with 6 month old silver material.
Any ideas most welcome.

[JoeJ]

It could have absorbed moisture at the supplier. It may also just have poor tolerances leading to inconsistent extrusion. There is a huge variation between the quality of plastic from different suppliers. I've even had people complain about one batch from the same supplier being worse than another!

Looks like you should try a new roll

[katapault]

Thanks, I did think it was moisture, but I noted that my usual supplier did not sell white, so I wondered if there were any properties that were peculiar to white only.
Do you have a preferred supplier? or can you recommend where to get a good quality 1.75 white from?

[JoeJ]

White PLA usually has less problems since that is the natural color of PLA, so you don't have added pigments. But moisture and diameter tolerances are still big concerns.

[sstantz]

To me that looks like you had a temporary problem with your flow. The low layers look decent and the high layers look decent, but there a a small section that looks severely under-extruded.

Have you tried printing that part again in white?

It could very well be that you had a partial blockage in your nozzle and then in pushed itself through and began extruding normally again. It could also be that for some reason you had a drop in extruder temperature for a few layers.

These are just a few possibilities. But personally, I wouldn't suspect that it is a problem with your filament tolerances, since it looks like you extruded almost no material for a few layers.

Just a few possibilities to consider:
Nozzle blockage.
Low temps (the same material in different color often needs different temps)
Idler slipping
filament to large in diameter - could cause feed problems due to getting stuck before it reaches the nozzle (i would say that's less likely though)

[adamcooks]

White PLA is not the natural color and has Titanium dioxide added to it. I find that white PLA will need higher temps then other colors. Make sure the spools feed freely as well, that could be a sicky spindle.

[MasterFX]

I also had problems with my first White PLA. Also also tried to reduce the print speed, going up with the temperature (220°C up to 250°C), at the end nothing really helps. The diameter was OK over a couple of meters.
A couple of weeks ago I tried an other supplier (but still noname Filament). With that PLA I didn't have problems.
Later on, I observed, that my first filament dissolved in Acetone (what normally should not happen on PLA at all, only ABS), not as easy as ABS but it got softer after a couple of minutes.
So maybe some manufacturers added some stuff to the PLA which should not be in there.
But new PLA is not as opaque/dense as the new one, and it is more brighter white.

See the attached image for comparison (left old = bad, right new = good)