****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This was my first full spool of filament and spent hours and then many $'s (including an automated filament drying box and just about every upgrade to the printer available over many months) trying to get my new 3D printer to work with this filament. I realize now that when I later switched out to a Black Creality filament I also had purchased (just in case my part finally came out), things all of a sudden were working decently and I was getting reasonable quality prints from very small to very large! Not perfect but generally worked and worked without supervision. Having then used up 3-4 other full rolls of other filaments and finally get things tuned up to produce highly detailed prints, I was out and put this remainder of a roll back on. This spool had been vacuum packed immediately after pulling out of the sealed dryer box when I first started with the Creality filament. This was packed with desiccant and stored in a cool, dark cabinet for around 4 months that it took to run through the other filament. Since putting this back on, I feel like I am back to day one! I haven't got a decent full print in weeks and have had to pull apart the head on many occasions after the filament just broke on it's own or yanked the dryer box until the filament broke and then jammed in the head. Did I mention also that this filament spool was wound improperly? I didn't know this at first as it was my first spool! After some period of time when MAYBE I was on the way to possibly getting a small print completed, I would come in after a crashing noise and find both the printer and the dryer box pulled together and the filament inside had turned into a giant knot! This happened every time the printer was going for more than 20-30 minutes that it would snag and knot up and I just thought this was a part of the 3D printing process was to monitor the spool for the inevitable knots and try and preempt them ahead of affecting the print.I just had to write this as a warning. I've now been through 6+ other spools of Amazon brand, Creality, and a few others with little to no problems at all. I'd thought so much of the problem was me being new to 3D printing and upgrading the machine in every conceivable way just to get a print out until I came back to this spool after using up the others and then realizing just how bad it was and that this spool of filament had been the source of thinking I needed $200+ in accessories and upgrades just to be able to print anything!!!Again, after weeks of problems just like I had been experiencing at first with this filament, I found another remnant spool of a different brand (off brand Chinese no less) and TADA! Back to no problems!!!Whatever is left of this spool is going immediately into the trash so I don't accidentally put this back on and spend more hours of frustration and tearing the machine apart to try and get something to print that never will. The most I ever got out of this spool as a small tray for holding a stack of game cards!Note that I generally look towards Monoprice as a quality supplier and why I had specifically selected this brand for my first full spool with the aim to avoid problems by trying to go with a company I believed in rather than going too cheap from get go with some unknown Chinese brand.Obviously I am WAY out of the return period and didn't understand the full deficiencies of this product until very much later but will avoid this like the plaque and caution others to not have to go through all of the hours and hours of frustration that I did. This purchase may not completely turn me off of Monoprice products as a whole but certainly in regards to any 3D printing related materials and I will be definitely be thinking extra hard on any other purchases I may find myself considering from them.The picture was a large, multi-part print I was able to finally achieve once I had moved on to different filament brands not realizing that this Monoprice spool was the sum total cause of most of the problems I had been experiencing up to that point (and again coming back to this filament that informed me what had been going on all of that time previous).
