MakerGeeks' Random Filament Package - A $20 Pain in the Ass

[printbus]

I sort of have a different view of the Toner Plastics stuff from Microcenter. I was thrilled at the possibility of being able to buy filament at a great price at a local store, often on sale no less. And yes, every body seems to love the TP stuff. So, I bought a bunch of 1.75mm ABS and PLA - basically a spool of every color the local store had in stock. So far I've printed from three of the ABS spools. It has all printed fine, except the "red" turned out to be more like outdoor extension-cord orange after it was printed. All the PLA got returned. I had two colors stop extruding at random points. On black, the worst of the two, prints would fail predictably from within minutes to within no longer than 1-1/2 hours. I eventually figured out that there were bumps in the filament that would hang up on the top end of the hexagon hot end that I have. I measured the bumps to as large as 1.93mm in diameter. That's a pretty big bump for 1.75mm filament. Toner Plastics couldn't or wouldn't resolve my questions on whether they thought this was just a bad lot of black PLA, so I returned all the PLA rather than risking prints continuing to fail with it. I even offered to send them samples of the bumps, but they didn't seem interested in getting them.

EDIT: I later realized that ALL the positive feedback I've seen on TonerPlastics is for their ABS...