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My Ultimaker S5 was purchased in late 2019. Believe it or not, I'm still using the PVA spool that came with it, with no problems. It was unsealed the day the printer was delivered—December 2019. What I do is to always keep it stored in an air-tight bag—is it called a zip bag?—and only take it out when I want to print something. In the zip bag I use many silica gels that I bake in my kitchen oven at 80° C for a couple of hours, just before resealing the PVA spool. During printing I put the PVA spool in the holder behind the printer, just like normal filament. No special box or other protection, PVA is fully exposed during printing, which can be up to a couple of days each time. After the printing completes, it goes back in the zip bag with the freshly baked silica gels. It works every time, with no problems and no breakage in the Bowden tube, but see below for a very important point:
The trick for the PVA not to break inside the Bowden tube, is to never reuse the part of the PVA that was previously inserted into the Bowden tube (from the previous print). What I mean is this: when you finish a print and unload the filament from the print core, there is a length of PVA (same length as the Bowden tube) which has already been through the feeder. You can see this by looking at the surface of the PVA filament—you can see the serrations (small teeth markings caused by the feeder). When you unload the PVA, you should always cut off and throw away that serrated part (with the feeder teeth markings). This is the cause of the breakage, because PVA is brittle, and the serrations cause it to break when re-fed through the feeder in the next print.
Another neat trick to prolong the life of your PVA—I thought about this very recently—is to just measure and cut only the amount you need for a print. You can see this in Cura, it tells you pretty accurately how many meters it needs, so you can open the zip bag, measure the length you need + the length of the Bowden tube (add a little bit more for safety), cut it out and immediately re-seal the PVA spool.
Just my two cents, hope it helps someone out there.
Edited by DrCeeVee
Added comment by @gr5.
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StevenD90s 3
If the material is PVA, you may want to try drying the spool on the heated build plate or a food dehydrator first before loading it onto the S3. I ran into the same problem with a brand new spool of PVA. All I can tell you is that PVA is a very difficult material to deal with. Good luck!
https://support.ultimaker.com/hc/en-us/articles/360012057799
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gr5 2,265
Actually I think maybe the filament is too dry. Some UM PVA filaments (my spools of PVA are fine by the way) are too brittle and can crack in the bowden. I've heard good things about aquasys water soluble filaments but never tried it.
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