Just a tip… Silica packing beads don’t last very long and are relatively expensive. An easy/cheap alternative is to use “crystal” cat litter.
I use the color indicating silica beads for cameras, and a hygrometer. You need to regularly refresh these in a microwave, or they’ll get saturated and useless. 100% power for 2 minutes should do the trick.
Baking the filament seems to have made it work. I did notice that some lengths of it snapped off pretty easy while I was unwinding it for the oven, so I wonder if that might be it.
I wonder if it would be safe to throw the entire spool in the oven.
@Brook_Drumm @Loong_Jin_Chow Thanks for the tips!
I bake the whole spool 
glad it worked!
Not all spools will survive an oven. I had a few spools warp in the oven.
PLA that has absorbed moisture tends to become a little more brittle, and becomes difficult to extrude with an improperly designed all-metal hotend, but baking the moisture away makes it easier. See this thread for a discussion on the topic: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/flashforge/uUUM5-Knuys/discussion.
PTFE-lined ones such as the genuine J-head (and even the knockoff all-metal J-heads which are actually E3D clones) and properly designed all-metal hotends with sufficient cooling in the cold-end such as the E3D and Hexagon hotends will be able to print those without baking. I’m currently using a Flashforge all-metal hotend (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:797746) and an E3Dv5 knockoff+self-made heat break which both happily extrude year-old PLA that has been left out in the open at 60%RH with no problems.
I was taking a look at the E3D Lite6, after hearing about it via @Robotchery on Reddit. I wonder if that would work with a printrbot.
Now that Carl has the all metal Ubis 13 out in the world, he is designing some mods and derivative designs. Should be interesting to see what he comes up with! I think he is working on a hybrid design using a Teflon liner… If people prefer forgiving performance with “bad” filament over absolute precision, maybe it’s going to be a good choice. We will just have to wait and see