80 °C for 8 to 12 hours. Longer and hotter than any of the common filaments, and the reason is that nylon holds far more water than they do.
The schedule is the easy part. The difficult part is that finishing it does not mean you are finished.
Drying once is not enough
Nylon absorbs moisture from the air faster than anything else on this site. A spool dried overnight and left on an open shelf can be measurably wet again within a day, and a long print will re-absorb enough during the print itself to spoil the later layers.
So the working method is not "dry, then print". It is print from the dryer — feed the filament straight out of a heated box, or at minimum out of a sealed container with fresh desiccant, for the whole duration of the job.
That is why a nylon workflow costs more than a nylon spool suggests: the dryer runs alongside the printer, not before it.
What wet nylon looks like
Steam at the nozzle, visible foaming in the extrusion, a surface that looks chewed rather than layered, and layer bonds so weak the part comes apart in your hands. It is the most dramatic moisture failure of any filament, and it is unmistakable once you have seen it.
There is no salvaging the print. Stop, dry the spool properly, restart.
The filled and high-temperature grades
- PA6-CF and PA6-GF use the same 80 °C for 8 to 12 hours; the fibre does not change the schedule but makes a wet print's weakness worse, because fibre-matrix bonding depends on a void-free melt
- PPA goes to 100 °C for 8 to 16 hours, matching its far higher softening point
Check the material page before assuming a nylon schedule transfers.
Whether it worked
Weigh the spool at the start and end of the cycle. Nylon is the one material where the mass change is large enough to read on a kitchen scale — a badly wet reel can shed several grams — so this is a genuine test rather than a gesture.
A twelve-hour cycle in an 80 W unit costs 17 cents at the US rate — put your own dryer's wattage and hours into the print cost calculator to check. Grade-by-grade schedules are on the PA6 page, and the wider running-cost picture is at what drying filament costs.