Experiment: Using a fruit dehydrator to dry filament.
Here, I am trying some Nylon trimmer line as ‘filament’ (extruded at 260 degrees, all metal hotend; size is about 1.67mm, corrected for that). It had been sitting around for a while, so it absorbed quite some water and was creating little steam puffs every second or so. The bad quality printed screw on the left shows the result.
Then I tried a fruit dehydrator - essentially a hot air chamber - on the same filament which I left on for 8 hours on the highest setting (~ 70C air temperature) and printed again; the steam-puffs were not entirely gone, but much smaller and further in-between. The print quality was much better (right screw).
So for a good result, that probably would need to be left in there for 24h.
Of course, this would’ve been faster in an oven at 150 degrees and Nylon is fine with that. But this is an pre-experiment for drying PLA - there the finer temperature control is important to not get over the glass transition threshold and create a big blob.
(Screws done with code at hzeller/gcode-multi-shell-extrude on github).
