PLA as a raw material is really cheap - you can get it for as little as a few dollars a kilo - and a lot of the cost of a filament roll is just making the spool, packaging, and shipping it. In the end, the price difference between 250g and 1kg of PLA on a roll is rather tiny. Goes the other way too, you can buy 5kg rolls that come down to just $10-15/kg.
The same reason why a can of cola is so expensive compared to a big bottle.
I buy samples from Atomic Filament when I don’t know which filament would work best for a project. They are 50g spools for under $4 each. It is usually enough filament to print out a filament sample card and a small test piece.
Agreed, large spools are too much if you want to play around with all the colors. I have a box of old filament, each spool in plastic with a dry packet and the whole box with a couple of bags of drying stuff and a good seal on the top. But after getting a spool out to use recently (spool about 2 year old) and it printed like shit. I tried putting it in a dryer, but it didn’t help. So I tried more of these spools and they almost all seem to have gone bad.
Such a shame, I should have bought smaller spools, but they are harder to get and often more expensive.
You did try drying it in a dehydrator before you did that, right?
Because I have spools almost that old, they print fine after a night in there. Brittle as dry spaghetti if I don’t though.
Same. I go through periods of printing a lot then getting busy and not touching it for months. I’ve noticed my PLA and PLA+ get really brittle as they age even when stored in a dry box and drying again before use.
I can usually get it to print but I have to be gentle with it.
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