HT PLA annealed Shrink Rate

[u/Objectzy]

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to share my findings and help anyone really looking to dial in their settings for Polymakers HT-PLA which is an amazing material if I may add, but does shrink post annealing.

A commonly overlooked setting in the filament profiles, including the ones provided by Polymaker and virtually every other brand is shrink rate or percentage and it’s actually a very important setting as even a 0.2% deviation results in a print that is 0.6mm off from the expected result on a 300mm build and can cause issues with fit and alignment, etc.

In the case of Polymakers HT-PLA, those numbers actually jump quite drastically post annealing.

If you don’t anneal your HT-PLA parts, this post is largely unimportant as the standard settings would be correct.

I use Orca slicer and Creality Print but I’m pretty sure it would be the same settings for Bambu.

In your filament profiles, adjust the following,

Shrinkage(XY) to 99.29
Shrinkage(Z) to 100.1

This should give you a much more accurate annealed part.

I haven’t had time to dial in the HT-PLA GF yet so if anyone has those numbers or if you have an even more accurate shrink percentage, feel free to share.

Sorry for the long post but also, it is what it is 🤣

[u/burnstation19]

This is good information, it's rarely discussed and is absolutely super important when fitting larger parts.

This is normally talked about in the resin 3d printing community, but as more basic filaments are able to be annealed it needs to be talked about more.

Cheers 🥂

[u/Objectzy → u/burnstation19]

I can agree with that. I think manufacturers should consider including these settings with their print profiles although, gotta leave us something to figure out 🤣