PVA jammed in Material Station

[subnoizellc 2]

A piece of PVA is stuck in the material station and the Ultimaker documents online do not work in removing the blockage.

 

Matterhackers.com took a whole day to send me the same link I had already tried so they are worthless. Then they tried to tell me the PVA was brittle because it was wet. So they apparently have never used PVA before.

 

I am about to get the screwdriver out and start taking the unit apart unless Ultimaker has a better solution.

 

For the record, yes you can over dry PVA by leaving it in the material station. It turns brittle like glass. You forget this and leave it for a month or two and then start printing and it shatters into multiple pieces all through the plumbing of the printer.

 

I would recommend taking the PVA out for a few hours and let it gain some moisture before printing. Two months in the material station seems to over dry the PVA filament.

 

Yeah, I know! Over drying Ultimaker PVA is a thing. Crazy stuff. But small price to pay for the quality of the prints using it I guess...

 

[subnoizellc 2]

Follow-up: I was able to work the piece of PVA out by running a piece of PLA backwards until I couldn't push any further. Then I ran the same piece of PLA back through the #2 port from within the material station and the piece of PVA came out just fine.

 

That step should be added to Ultimaker's document on removing PVA fragments from within the material station.

[SandervG 1,521]

Hi @subnoizellc, thank you for the tip of also pushing filament backwards, I'll share it with the product experts. Can you elaborate on why the 'standard' procedure didn't work? 

 

Regarding wet and over-dry filaments; the material station shouldn't be able to 'over-dry' your PVA. It should have a relative humidity of 20-30%. This means it allows for a little bit of humidity, enough for your PVA to stay in decent condition. It is possible that if there has been a lot of significant changes in humidity for longer than one day that this can effect the quality of your filament. Because due to humidity it will swell up, and then when it gets dry again it shrinks, etc. This can result in brittleness. But no worries! This can be restored. Warming it up for a short moment until 50ºC it will relax again. Don't get it over 60ºC, because then it will become more brittle again. 

 

I was wondering when you bought your Ultimaker Pro Bundle (assuming you didn't buy an UMS5 and Material Station) and if you have replaced the feeder since? We have updated the feeders some time ago, and you might be eligible to replace them and improve your success rate with printing PVA. You can find more information here. Hope this helps!