Previously, we've already been taking a look at another of Colorfabbs foaming filaments, and that was Light Weight PLA. By printing that material at temperatures of up to 250°C, you can lower its density by almost 60%, giving it a really nice texture and, more importantly, making it well suitable for things like RC airplanes, as, for example, Eclipson perfectly demonstrates.

Colorfabb uses a similar approach and adds a foaming agent, which is in the most simple case baking soda, to TPU. This foaming agent that is finely distributed all over the material is activated at elevated temperatures and releases a gas, for example, CO2, and makes the material foam up in it's molten state. The higher the temperature, the more gas is released; hence you can use the temperature to adjust the material's density. With Light Weight PLA this is used to make the material itself lighter while still preserving some mechanical properties. VarioShore TPU specifically uses the degeneration of mechanical properties when you lower the density. This results in very soft parts on printers that would otherwise not be able to handle flexible filaments, or even printing flexibles faster, because you generate more material volume in the nozzle, and therefore, the extruder doesn't need to work as hard.

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If you ever used a garden trimmer, you might have noticed the trimmer line that's used resembles 3D printing filament closely and is often made from Nylon. Not everyone has a roll of Nylon at home because that's usually quite expensive and often not the easiest to print with. So my question was if trimmer line from the hardware store is a feasible alternative to real 3D printing filament if you, maybe just need it for a small part and don't want to spend half your allowance on a kilogram spool? So, I headed to my local hardware store and found Oregon trimmer line that's even 1.7mm in diameter. The roll with 15m, which is around 42g cost me 2.79€ and if you do the math, you end up not that much more expensive than if you would buy filament, and hey, it's available in your hardware store and you don't need to buy a full spool. There are half and full pound rolls available that are a bit cheaper per kilo. I was quite surprised that the diameter of my Oregon trimmer line was pretty consistent and basically perfectly in the range of what normal 3D printing filament has. Even the product description says that it's made from a Nylon co-polymer that's fortified with additives so it lasts longer and breaks less. Not too bad for mechanical parts, if we're able to print it!

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I have plenty of 3D printers in my home shop, together with a CNC router and even two diode laser engraver. Though one piece of equipment that I wanted to have, is a CO2 laser cutter because it allows you to cut and mark a large variety of materials without a lot of setup and with only minimum mess. For this reason, I was really happy when the company FLUX reached out to me and offered one of their latest CO2 laser cutters for review.

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Remelting 3D prints in salt seems to be the new hype, and I see why. In comparison to my plaster annealing method, you simply embed your 3D prints in salt, put everything in the oven to remelt the plastic and end up with injection-molded strength 3D prints, or do you? After watching my video on plaster annealing, a viewer named "free spirit 1" posted a video on his salt remelting method that he had been working on in the past. Well, and it became kind of viral! In his video, he showed how the process basically works, though I started further investigating it, looking at salt grain sizes, treatment temperatures, dimensional accuracy, and, most importantly, strength. I'll also discuss to pros and cons of using table salt and what alternatives there could be.

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Believe it or not, but this is my first delta 3D printer that I’ve ever used and this is also why I was really excited to get my hand on the FLSUN Q5. A delta printer is mainly different from a classic, cartesian 3D printer due to the way it moves the printhead. In order to move the nozzle to a specific location even only on one axis, all 3 stepper motors need to move the vertical slides in a coordinated manner. This does look very mesmerizing and allows you to move the printhead very quickly, though comes with added computational effort and, in the past often difficult calibration.

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For ages, I’ve been looking for the holy grail of 3D printing, and this is for me, getting 3D prints with a strength similar to injection molded parts. 3D printed materials can be really strong, but most of them show only 50% or less strength if they are loaded perpendicular to the layers. In the past, I tried a couple of methods to improve layer adhesion or fuse the layers together post-printing. Even though some helped a little, none of them showed a significant difference. A couple of tests involved annealing the parts, simply in an oven, submerged in sand or even ABS, internally reinforced with polycarbonate. Annealing usually involves dimensional changes of the parts from either sagging because the prints become soft or the reduction of internal stresses or crystallization. In the comments under one particular video, viewers wanted me to anneal my parts in plaster to minimize warping and even using the closed cast as a mold in which I can re-melt the printed part and fuse the layers together. So this is what I’ve finally been working on

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Of course this is a marketing campaign by Polymaker, though I haven’t been paid for this video and will even participate on my own. Our task is to design the strongest hook with some design restrictions, print three of them in Polymakers PolyMax PLA, and send them to Polymaker until September 25th 2020, who will be then testing them against each other to find a winner. The requirement to print the parts in precisely their material has a strange aftertaste for a competition. Still, I can understand it in a way so that everyone uses the same material and doesn’t have an advantage by using some fancy carbon fiber reinforced filament or whatever. Well, and it’s good for sales… If you don’t have any Polymax PLA or don’t want to buy some or maybe even don’t have a 3D printer, stay until the end of the video where I’ll tell you about a way you could still enter the competition.

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Regular PLA is really easy to print and stronger than some might expect, though if a PLA part actually fails, it shatters quite violently. During the last years, many companies brought modified PLA filaments onto the market that claim to improve on the downsides, up to the point that some even call their modified PLA “Eco ABS”. Have you ever used a modified PLA and how was your experience? Let’s discuss down in the comments! There is not one PLA Plus or Tough PLA, so I can’t compare all of them, but I received a roll of Polymakers PolyLite PLA, which I call a regular “PLA” and a roll of their “PolyMax PLA” with is the modified version which I’ll use to represent PLA Plus. I thought this is a great opportunity to finally compare the two materials. The results will not match 100% with any other brand, but we’ll see really clear trends.

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So filaments made from PC /ABS, which is a blend of the two materials, is something that is quite common and helps combine different properties of those materials for specific needs. I have been using PC/ABS or other PC blends in the past, and even though they show good overall properties, layer adhesion in particular is still something they are usually not great at. When I first read the articles about this new type of filament, I wasn’t sure how this star-shaped pattern inside of the filament should help with mechanical properties. The paper they wrote about this method explained it better, though. The general idea is, that you heat treat your parts over the glass transition temperature but below the melting point, after printing which, supposedly fuses the layers together. Unfortunately, if you usually put prints into an oven and heat them over their glass transition temperature, which is important that the healing process works, they severely deform and make them not properly usable anymore. The idea behind the dual material filament is that the flow of the material through the 3D printer nozzle is laminar, so your print, that looks from the outside like ABS, is reinforced internally via a continuous polycarbonate core. This is important for the heat treatment step. ABS has a glass transition temperature of around 100°C and PC significantly higher at around 140°C. In order to minimize deformation, the heat treatment temperature with this material is above the glass transition temperature of ABS but below the one of PC. This way the polycarbonate stays strong and reinforces the ABS and minimizes deformation during the process. The long exposure to heat, in the paper, they treated parts for 3 to 7 days, supposedly fuses the ABS layers, giving it superior strength, especially in-between the layers. Sounds like a plausible idea to me and worth trying out. PC and ABS are a good combination of materials for such a task, because they are mixable and work and can fuse together. Not every material combination does work due to things like polarity and you might have experienced that in the past, when you, for example, changed materials from Nylon to PLA and noticed that the first layers don’t stick together anymore until enough material got purged.

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Well, it finally happened, and I bought myself a Mini Lathe after desiring one for years. You ask why? Well, that’s also what my wife asked. As This Old Tony once said, you always need one more milling machine, and I think that also applies to lathes. Well, I regularly have projects in mind like for example special nozzles for the Filastruder that would require such a tool. I desired having a lathe at my disposal because this is, in my opinion, one of the most honest ways to machine metal. It’s such a pleasure to dive your tool into the material, adjust the pressure with your hand and just feel the metal being peeled off. Probably also one of the reasons why I’m currently not planning to convert it to CNC, or what do you think? I don’t have a lot of space and it had to go down into my basement, so a Mini Lathe, in my case the Sieg SC2 with a 450W motor and 400mm distance between the centers, was the machine of choice. I bought mine from a local vendor that also just imports them but I hoped for more quality control on their side. The lathe was around 1000€ delivered plus another 500€ for additional tools and accessories. You can get similar models cheaper, but this one at least came with all metal gears and a tailstock with a quick lock. Even though I didn’t do any real modifications, I still took it apart, cleaned all the ways put it back together and adjusted the gib strips. The only thing I really changed is adding a Multifix Tool Post, and that thing is a piece of beauty and worth every penny!

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