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Filament - lesson learned


mvdveer

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Just some reflections on the use of filaments - named or otherwise. Used to print eSun from the start - got to know the filament and the quirks of it. Whether it was PLA, PETG or ABS (and the + variants) Had the printers pretty well tuned in to this.

But like all of us - always in search of something better. I also strongly belief in buying local and supporting the local manufacturers.

So, I went and invested in locally ROHS compliant filament (and the Australian mark of approval)- won't name the brand. And......... it has been a rocky ride. Some rolls of filament printed without an issue - others - disastrous - extrusion issues, clogging with prints stopping halfway and printing air, etc. There was NO consistency. It seems the filament (same color, same type ) differed from batch to batch. This made it extremely hard to have a consistent slicer profile.

Finally, after another "air print" today, I decided to waste a brand new roll of ABS(Black) and un-spool it. What a surprise. The filament diameter varied as much as 0.25mm. So, the roll of 1.75,mm (1kg) had areas of up to 2mm thick - could clearly see the thickening of the filament, and areas as low as 1.5mm. Some parts of the filament looked like it had "blobs " in it.

So much for buying local. Have reverted back to e-Sun filament. I know it, I like it, and it prints consistently well.

Was going to try some Polymaker (about a 1/3 more expensive than e-Sun) as I heard very good reports on it. Now I am scary boy!

 

 

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I've had good luck both Polymaker and Overture, mostly ABS and PLA.

I recently tried a roll each Paramount3D PLA and ABS, because they had a color that I couldn't find from Polymaker or Overture.  The Paramount3d filament printed better than anything i've used before.   It was very good.

It still won't be on my go-to list though, at least not at 30$ a roll 🤨

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I use DasFilament (manufacturerd in germany) PETG and PLA without issues. I also use Prusament ASA and Extrudr ASA DuraPro (manufactured in austria) succesfully. I always print a filament-specific temperature-tower before using filaments the first time.

In my opinion, all those mentioned filaments above are easy to print after getting the right temperature-settings from the temperature-tower.

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I have had lots of luck with the Polymaker, E-sun and Overture filaments (ABS,PETG, Nylon-CF, PC) I also like the Eryone filaments for PLA. 

Duramic 3D filament was also good

I just picked up some Spectrum ABS and it's been working great.

The only one I would never buy again was from Anycubic. Maybe I just had a bad roll but it was 'challenging'. 

 

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in France we have "ariane plast" witch is local for me.

He told me that a lot of french brand re-sell  cheap Chinese filament they buy in bulk in Spain. He does not, he works with European made top notch pelets and produces filament on his own very precises machines. I guess the producer you have locally are maybe also resellers of el-cheapo filament, sadlly witch would explain poor diameter calibration and bad extrusion characteristics.

He has good ASA and ABS and very good recycled rolls, sadly some of the stock is quite low but if you want and find a good product, try it out.

the recycled PLA printed very very well for me.

Also what is very interesting is the price. They are very low on some products. Check below :

https://www.arianeplast.com/

Screenshot 2023-03-02 at 12.21.19.png

Edited by leo etchaas
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10 hours ago, leo etchaas said:

in France we have "ariane plast" witch is local for me

Unfortunately I am at the ass-end of the world and postage from Europe or the USA is double the price of the filament. Very limited choice in Australia. e-Sun seems to be the most popular.  Polymaker is reasonably available as is Spectrum and XD- filament/ But colors are limited.

10 hours ago, leo etchaas said:

I guess the producer you have locally are maybe also resellers of el-cheapo filament,

AS I understand they import the pellets and manufacture their own - is what I was told, but one never knows

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  • 2 weeks later...

Has anyone used https://www.zyltech.com/?  I purchased my printed parts for my v 2.4 from a guy on Etsy and he used Zyltech.  I love their dark blue color and the prices are very reasonable.  I don't have enough time on my printer to make an accurate assessment of the filament, but what little printing I have done it seems to work well. 

 

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My goto filament is Polymaker. I'm currently using their white and grey ASA Lite to print parts for my current build. I also like their PLA as well. Especially their Poly-Terra brand. Their matte finish looks awesome IMO. I've also used their Nylon and also TPU 95A. Again, great filaments. On par with Polymaker is Prusament. I used their galaxy suite of colors in both ASA and PLA. LIke that filament as well. Hatchbox is another I've had good experiences with. One brand I used for quite a while was 3D Solutech, Amazon bargain filament, and I had good results with it as well. Over the holidays I used some 3 year old 3D Solutech PLA and it printed great.

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On 3/16/2023 at 7:27 PM, 7milesup said:

Has anyone used https://www.zyltech.com/?  I purchased my printed parts for my v 2.4 from a guy on Etsy and he used Zyltech.  I love their dark blue color and the prices are very reasonable. 

So far very pleased with Zyltech ABS Black & Green.  Printed a few rolls. From reviews the Red is washed out.  Thanks for the tip on the Blue. Great ABS prices.  Love their Texas Sized Spools!  I load up during their holiday sales. 

Paramount has the richest red I have seen.  Stay away from their TPU 92A- serious dimension issues as of sept 2022.

Been mostly printing Yousu & Zyltech TPU.  Both I'd say are good

 

On 3/19/2023 at 1:19 PM, Penatr8tor said:

My goto filament is Polymaker.

Any blobbing issues with Polymaker TPU?  What kind of flow rates are you running?  What pressure advance? help?

 

eSun specs their ABS with Heat Distortion Temp(78℃,0.45MPa)

Polymaker specs ABS Heat deflection temperature ISO 75 1.8MPa 98.2 °C.  ASA is like 100C- bought a roll because of the temp rating, but now not so sure.  Need to break it out and run some tests. Can their ABS have that much higher of a deflection temp compared to sSun?  Polymaker has nice datasheets.

I know to stay away from eSun ABS+ because it is rated at 73C heat distortion temp.

I love Matterhackers Blue but it creates the most fumes of any ABS I have run.  Filters have to run over time.

   

 

 

 

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9 hours ago, to-the-nth said:

Any blobbing issues with Polymaker TPU?  What kind of flow rates are you running?  What pressure advance? help?

   

No, No blobbing issues. Material is Polymaker TPU95A Blue. I use Superslicer, 220c-230c nozzle, 60c Bed. Speed is down around 60 mm/s. Output is... Well you can see. It's pretty close to perfect.

TPU_Skull_01.thumb.jpg.778479e4c5a4b06ea0c47507388e312f.jpg

TPU_Skull_02.thumb.jpg.5a69a031249f690a5882d5e02358daa0.jpg

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I'm jealous. I'm using Ninjatek Cheetah TPU and can't get good surfaces yet. I'm in the process of recalibrating all my tuning settings and ma working with the TPU right now.PXL_20230323_060004384.jpg.90cf2e7deffde46153590f179c15b135.jpgPXL_20230323_060013984.jpg.d1919679c5be03caac705880eebaa20e.jpg

Still getting these gaps & pockmarks. I'm printing at about 30mm/s, 240C, 40C bed. Extrusion multiplier is currently at 104%. I'm thinking of testing at 105-106% (top surface looks good). Oh, I also destroyed a PEI plate with this one--gotta remember to lay down some glue stick for this stuff. 🤦‍♂️

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19 minutes ago, claudermilk said:

Still getting these gaps & pockmarks. I'm printing at about 30mm/s, 240C, 40C bed. Extrusion multiplier is currently at 104%. I'm thinking of testing at 105-106% (top surface looks good). Oh, I also destroyed a PEI plate with this one--gotta remember to lay down some glue stick for this stuff. 🤦‍♂️

Something's not right. It should just work. I went in cold not knowing anything about printing TPU and that skull was one of my 1st prints with Polymaker's recommended settings. On prints where the toolhead jumps around a lot I get stringing but on single prints, it's almost perfect as long as I stay within the speed limit. 

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@claudermilk I'm running a little test on the RatRig V-Minion with a roll of Polymaker TPU-95A in blue I have. This stuff is 6 months old and was stored in the original bag with desiccant and box. I pulled it out and am doing my first ever TPU print on this machine. I found a cool tire to print on Thingiverse. My first print was with extruder temp set to 220 and speed set to 60 mm/s for everything.  Total fail... Way too fast. So I tried again with the speed set to 30 mm/s for everything. As I watched the first two layers getting put down, I noticed a small amount of under extrusion, so I forced the hotend temp up to 230c. Now it's printing pretty nice as far as I can tell. No under extrusion etc. I'll post up a pic of the completed tire once it's done, for now I have this in process print. It's looking pretty good. My extrusion multiplier for the V-Minion is set to 0.89 (that's the default from the SuperSlicer V-Minion printer profile).

TPU_Print.thumb.jpg.0dcb4a591c9e3e14243dcecd49d8d145.jpg

Edited by Penatr8tor
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Alrighty then...

@claudermilk The tire model completed without any gaps or skips etc. @ 30 mm/s, Nozzle 230, Bed 30. No excessive sticking to the bed either. p.s. I wiped the bed with alcohol as I always do before a print. I find that getting under an edge and peeling the part off is better than a vertical pull.

 

Here you can see where I had the issue on the 1st layer and once I upped the temp from 220 -> 230. It printed fine the rest of the way. FWIW is took 2 hrs 10 min. to print.

Tire is 55mm Dia x 22mm Thk with 34mm ID

TPU_Tire_1stPass_02.thumb.jpg.a78cb9356ee7e8d8452f9e716c78ad70.jpg

Overall Not too bad.

TPU_Tire_1stPass_01.thumb.jpg.875a5b26f56ecd0e56f26e62a5237a90.jpg

So in conclusion... Same filament printed on a Voron 2.4 with CW2 extruder w/ Dragon HF and a RatRig V-Minion with LGX Lite extruder w/ DragonFly hotend.

I think there's something you might be missing and please correct me if I'm wrong but, You might be applying too much pressure to the filament with your extruder. What I mean by that is that if you print PLA or ABS or any of the typical hard plastics... High extruder grip tension (I don't know the proper term for this but it's the thumb screw on the side of the extruder) will distort the soft filament and as it exits the grip wheels the filament expands and can jam in the little space between the grip wheels and the filament hole before the extruder. I would say... park the printhead 100mm above the bed and see if you can improve flow with some real time thumbscrew twisting while you're extruding 50mm of filament. If that doesn't solve your problem then try it could be the filament. My guess is that there's no industry standard for TPU filament and every vendor has their own recipe. Polymaker might give up a little flexibility for printability whereas Ninjatech may not. Just a guess and just trying to help.

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OK, This will be my penultimate response on this...

I sliced the file at 40 mm/s with 230c nozzle and 30c bed.

Beautiful!

Just for good measure... I also sliced the file at 60 mm/s 235c Nozzle and 30c Bed. I haven't had any issues at that speed yet however... the afternoon is still young and the print is only about 10 layers in so we will see.

On the left is the 30 mm/s print. 40 mm/s print is on the right.

TPU_Tire_1st2ndPass.thumb.jpg.10d5586b9509bfc83a192b199b04108d.jpg

Here's 60 mm/s print. I just looked in on the print and it looks great so far.

https://youtube.com/shorts/cEBpjiZODsw

 

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Thanks for the input. I am trying running at EM 1.04 which seemed to reduce the pockmarking. I'm running at 240C hotend and 40C bed and about 30mm/s.

The toolhead is full Stealtburner, so Clockwork2 extruder--which is supposed to be tweaked to handle TPU well. There's as little space between the dual drive gears and the feed holes as is physically possible.

Maybe I'll get a spool of Polymaker and give it a try.

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2 hours ago, claudermilk said:

Maybe I'll get a spool of Polymaker and give it a try.

Maybe, but I don't think the brand is your issue. I think your issue might be that the thumb screw on your extruder is too tight. I can not stress enough that the more you squish the filament... the more the print quality goes down. It's counter intuitive I know but... well watch this and you'll see.

https://youtu.be/X2k8uJ9m4lw?t=98

 

Edited by Penatr8tor
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On 3/24/2023 at 9:44 AM, Penatr8tor said:

Maybe, but I don't think the brand is your issue. I think your issue might be that the thumb screw on your extruder is too tight. I can not stress enough that the more you squish the filament... the more the print quality goes down. It's counter intuitive I know but... well watch this and you'll see.

https://youtu.be/X2k8uJ9m4lw?t=98

Thanks for the link. That was a rabbit hole I still haven't found the bottom to.

So I've pulled the top off the Trident and bypassed my filament sensor and near-meter of PTFE. That didn't fix anything. Right now running another test cube after backing the tension screw off by 2 turns; hopefully that resolves it. Oh, and reloading the TPU I actually had the bugger escape like his videos show. Took some doing in the CW2, but it managed it. As in "Why TF isn't anything extruding?" <open latch> "Oh. Well that's a first"

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51 minutes ago, claudermilk said:

That was a rabbit hole I still haven't found the bottom to.

I know right? LOL.

I've got a good meter of bowden that the filament has to run thru on my 2.4 and I had good results. The little RatRig is less than a foot, that's what I did the tests on.

After printing the tires for testing I found that 60 mm/s was right at the flow limit so I backed off to 40 mm/s, saved the profile in SuperSlicer and called it a day.

Just a thought... If you have a .6mm nozzle. That might just be the ticket to get the extra flow you need to get decent prints.

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I was actually thinking of trying it with the 0.6mm nozzle. I have the entire range of sizes for the Revo (0.15-0.8). I also was able to talk with someone from MatterHackers last night & one of the things he suggested was ditch retractions. Worth a try. But the first thing I think I need to do is finally get some kind of filament dryer.

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@claudermilk Good seeing you on Nero's stream yesterday. I was curious about how he was going to power his Pi and he responded with, I'm using the Octopus and then at the end it he ended up deciding that he want to connect the Pi via UART. I hope he covers in on the next stream so I can see how he goes about setting it up. 

Anyways, I digress... Yeah, I tried a .6mm for a good number of prints and it performed comparable to a .4mm when printing at .2mm layer heights and you get the benefits of a wider extrusion that helps with overhangs and layer to layer adhesion. As far as a dryer goes... I have two of them, One is a 1st gen JOYO white on bottom with clear top and while it's pretty basic and fan less... it does the job. I also have a Sunlu that is made from grey tinted plastic with an lcd touchscreen built into the side. Also fanless but has better control and more drying features, it works too. Bear in mind that I'm in TX, my filament and printers are inside of an airconditioned home that is generally 35% humidity or less. If you're on the coast or have your stuff in a garage or shed or something then you probably have a more challenging environment to deal with than I do.

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