Knot on the filament?

At 3D Eksperten, we sell quite large quantities of filament and have a few times experienced some frustrated customers who complain about "knots" on their filament. We naturally understand how frustrating it can be - that the 3d printer runs out of filament in the middle of a print, in the middle of the night or under a tight deadline.

We will try to illuminate the area and hope that it is useful information =)

When you receive your filament, you will see that the filament is packed in a vacuum packed plastic bag with a small bag of silicon - so far, so good!

The next thing you will notice is that the filament is stuck (the end of the filament) between two small holes in the side of the coil - this must of course be the case on all coils, as this is your guarantee that there are no "knots" or on other way the felted filament on the roll, before your reception and self-treatment.

The typical mistake

What most often happens is that the user drops the filament when either loading or unloading filament in their 3d printer. When you lose the thread, what you see in the above video will happen - the tip can very easily roll during another roll on the spool - and then you have the problem! A knot on your filament.

Forked suspension of your filament.

When and if you have your filament either hanging on the side, on the wall, in an external holder or wherever you have your filament - then you have to make sure that the coil runs "safely". By this we mean that it is important that the reel cannot be allowed to run freely, as this can cause the threads of the reel to become loose and thus lie on top of each other.

How is it solved?

Watch the movie :)

In short, you need to find the "knot" on your filament and then take all the rolls beyond the edge of the roll - then roll it back onto the spool.

Who is responsible for it?

It is of course frustrating when the filament knots and creates problems during printing - however, we point out that it is solely the user's responsibility to keep a watchful eye on their 3d printer to always make sure that this does not happen - never let it stand and work without supervision.

We have of course seen that in some cases the filament can be wound very tightly on the rollers - this has typically been seen previously on coils with a small hollow diameter - this seems to mean that the manufacturer has to spin the inner coils very tightly and it can be difficult for some machines to "pull free" this is, among other things, one of the reasons why we use some very special coils with a large (min 55mm) hole diameter on all our 3DE Premium filament - the problem is that it is "tensioned too hard" on the coil.

So we can now rule out that knots can be made on the filament by the manufacturers - it can't be done :)

Here is a small film that briefly illustrates how filament can be wound on - it is, however, an older version, but shows the principles very well.