ColorFabb LW-PLA - Testing Foaming PLA
A couple of months ago Colorfabb released two really interesting new Filaments that are called VarioShore TPU and LW or Lightweight PLA. The cool thing about those materials is that, on the roll, they look like any other regular filament but during printing you can adjust their density by changing the nozzle temperature. The heat causes the generation gas withing the filament that then foams up with microscopic bubbles. With the TPU you notice that it gets softer when printed at higher temperatures hence, varioshore TPU, the PLA really nicely foams up and gets that matt surface. If you’re hearing foaming now you might wonder why this is a good thing because we usually avoid that effect by drying our filaments. In this case though foaming is used in a way more controlled manner that causes the extruded filament to foam up very uniformly with tiny bubbles. This isn’t achieved with water, like it is the problem with bad filament but by adding a blowing agent. A blowing agent is a substance that creates a gas when heated and is therefore capable of creating a cellular structure in our polymer. This can even be baking soda or some other chemicals that are finely mixed into the material before the filament is extruded. You don’t end up with a foamy filament during extrusion because it’s extruded under the decomposition point but the higher temperatures in your nozzle later start the process.
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Removing Zits and Blobs on your 3D prints - Adjust your Slicing Resolution!
So many viewers are constantly asking what a good, entry level 3D printer is so I currently have the Ender 3 Pro and the Alfawise U30 Pro running side by side in a comparison test. This review will be released at some other point in the future but I thought I’d share with you how I was able to get rid of these blobs on the surface of the U30 Pro prints because the solution is, I think a bit out of the ordinary. You often see these printing artifacts at the location where the printing move of a perimeter ends and the build-up pressure in the extrusion system pushes more material out of the nozzle before that pressure is relieved by the retraction move. This is mostly fixed by coasting, wiping or higher retractions though in the case where I noticed it, it was on a vase where the wall was printed in a spiral so theoretically at a constant speed of the printhead without any retractions or similar. Upon closer inspection I noticed that in reality though the printhead stuttered from time to time where again, the built-up pressure in the bowden extrusion system lead to the blobs. But why?
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Comparing PLA, PETG & ASA - feat. PRUSAMENT
Even though you can nowadays get almost any thermoplastic as a 3D printing filament PLA, PETG and ABS are still the most common ones used. PLA is the most printed material due to being very easy to print without any significant smell but with the downside of being a bit brittle and thermally not very resistant. ABS is slowly replaced by a very similar material which is ASA, that performs almost the same, but with the added benefit of being UV resistant, having less warping tendency and lower odor. PETG has been on the uprise since a couple of years and is praised for having the ease of printing of PLA but being less brittle and thermally more resistant. But how do those materials really perform in a side by side comparison and is there “a” best material.
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Gradient Infill for 3D Prints
Infill structure is the lattice material that is placed inside of your 3D prints so that you don’t have to print them 100% dense and therefore using a lot of material and time, where it’s often not needed. Infill comes in lots different varieties and I’ve tested many of them in the past already. There hasn’t been a lot of things going on over the recent years besides the current hype of gyroid infill which is a good choice for some applications but also not always.
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Threaded Inserts for 3D Prints - Cheap VS Expensive
Almost a year ago I released a very popular video on threaded inserts for 3D prints on which I got a ton of suggestions and comments. One of them was that I used for my tests a type of threaded insert that I found on my local eBay which looks quite a bit different than the typical ones that you find on AliExpress or also on Amazon. Despite the different look, do they really perform differently and how easy are they to use? This is something I tried to find out for this video. Did you also already try one of these types of inserts then let us know your experience down in the comments! For the last test I also used M5 threaded inserts, whereas it seemed that most of you rather put M3 inserts in your 3D prints, so I purchased similar M3 threaded inserts as last time from the same eBay shop. I also purchased a set of these brass inserts on Amazon, that probably are rather used in injection molding. I also was bombarded with ads for these Ruthex threaded inserts on Instagram lately, that claim that they are especially designed for 3D printing, so I also bought a bag of those on Amazon. Not a sponsor by the way. They do look kind of nice though I think that rather than being specifically designed for 3D printing, those are just some proper heat seat inserts but we’ll find out how they perform! Links to all of those are down in the description by the way.
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Big nozzles - How do they make your 3D prints stronger?
I’m sure you’ve all heard or even experienced it already that using a larger nozzle in you 3D printer seems to result in quite a bit more sturdy parts. I also had the same impression in the past but always asked myself if my 3D prints really are stronger because the layers bond together better or if it’s just additional material you put down that reinforce the parts. So, first things first, let me know in the comments if you regularly use bigger nozzles and for which purpose. In order to provide you with a proper answer I’ve investigated exactly that. For this reason, I printed my test hook in it’s standing orientation with a standard 0.4mm and a 0.8mm nozzle on my Original Prusa i3 MK3S. I chose this combination of diameters because it gives me the possibility to keep the wall thickness the same for both parts. If you’ve also watched my previous video, you’ll know that by adjusting the extrusion width you can not only fuse the layers at least a little better but also extrude quite a bit wider than the bore diameter of the tip. This also posed the question if instead of switching nozzles you could also use this setting to get the same effect.
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The effect of Extrusion Width on Strength and Quality of 3D prints
Most of us probably change the layer height we print with quite a bit and adjust it depending on if we want something fast or nice. A parameter that I don’t see many adjust is the extrusion width the slicer uses. And at this point I’d be really interested if you ever touched it and why. Let me know in the comments! The extrusion width is how wide the line of material that is printed is. Please don’t mix that up with the extrusion multiplier! The extrusion multiplier only adjusts the flow of material but keeps the distance between tracks the same, extrusion width sets the distance between extruded lines and adjusts material flow accordingly. Most of us probably use a 0.4mm nozzle on our machines and the width of the filament line doesn’t necessarily need to be exactly that value. Going smaller might seem a bit counterintuitive but is actually possible and can even be beneficial for quality. Most slicers use a standard value of 100 to 120% of the nozzle diameter. This means the material extrusion is as wide as nozzle orifice or just a bit wider. Since the nozzle tips have a bit of flat area around the hole the layer height will be kept and the material will not be squeezed upwards. Also, if I later talk about extrusion width, I will usually use the percent value which means what percentage of my 0.4mm nozzle diameter. Some slicers like Cura hide extrusion width by default and let you define the wall thickness which doesn’t necessarily need to be a multiple of the extrusion width. For full control over that value I used PrusaSlicer 2.1 for all prints.
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The influence of layer height on the strength of FDM 3D prints
Most of you probably set the layer height to adjust the amount of detail of your 3D prints and how smooth the surface finish shall be at the end. Thinner layers give you less of a stairstep effect but will increase the print time. Actually, the printing time is inverse proportional to the layer height, so using layers half the thickness will more or less double the print time. Since most of my prints at least, don’t always have to be horribly pretty, I’ve been asking myself for years if it’s better for the strength of my parts to print with thinner or thicker layers. If I’m talking about strength at this point, I actually mean layer adhesion, so how good the individual layers of material bond together. But I also analyzed the strength of samples that were printed laying down to find out if we also have an effect there. If you do some research online there are contradictory results you can find. Some claim higher strength with thinner, some with thicker layers. Thinner layers could be stronger because the molten material is squished out more from the nozzle and due to the low distance between nozzle the previous layer warms the material and helps with bonding. Also, since you extrude less plastic in a given amount of time the material stays in the meltzone for longer and therefore properly and evenly warms up and melts. Also, the density of parts with thinner layers could be higher due to smaller gaps between lines of already printed material. There is also a very interesting article on flow math, so the ways the amount of material extruded is calculated, on the Slic3r wiki, to which I leave a link in the description.
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HOW MUCH abrasive filaments damage your nozzle!
In the past I never really worried much about nozzle wear because I rarely printed abrasive materials and when I did, I switched my nozzle for a hardened steel one. One day I noticed after I inspected my changed nozzle a bit more closely that it showed severe marks of wear even though the only thing I printed before was just standard materials but probably for more than 1000 hours. At this point I asked myself where this abrasion is coming from and what influence it has on the print quality of my parts.
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