Original filament from EasyArts turns out to be ø1.6mm - far thinner than nominal

Original filament from EasyArts turns out to be ø1.6mm - far thinner than nominal ø1.75. Or it could be that the spool is really nonuniform, so after that huge bulge (Sign in - Google Accounts), it is much thinner. Should have checked at the beginning.

Originally shared by Yuan LIU

I finally gathered enough courage to retract the original filament from Ares 3D printer and put on a new roll. (In fact, that accidental breaking of the old filament was an encouragement. Sign in - Google Accounts) Some lessons learned.

Unlike the multicolour filament shipped with Ares, this one’s colour is called “nature” - it is like translucent with no colour, not even white. I guess that I really had no idea what “nature” looked like when I ordered. Another thing I noticed - following some comments on Amazon.com about another brand, that it is 0.5mm short of the nominal diameter. Yes, it is ø1.70mm instead of ø1.75. (2nd picture)

Anyway, this super cheap filament is also super sticky. I used the original slicer settings to print 20mm cubes. First on Harbor Freight blue tapes. (Lower right in the first picture.) It sticked so well that I had a hard time taking it off even after I removed surrounding tapes. That got my hopes high that this new filament will stick to bare glass. But no, no such luck. I even tried hairspray again. It lasted to the last few layers, but it still fell off.

The next test I did, was to adjust Slicer to use ø1.70 filament. Put side to side with the new print (upper left in the first picture), it is obvious that the first print suffer from under extrusion.

This reminds me that I have never checked size of the original filament. What a shock: What remains on the spool is only ø1.60mm! No wonder my previous cubes all have signs of under extrusion, and my attempt to use flow control to compensate did not work.