3DPrinting
3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.
The r/functionalprint community is now located at: or !functionalprint@fedia.io
There are CAD communities available at: !cad@lemmy.world or !freecad@lemmy.ml
Rules
-
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
-
Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
-
No porn (NSFW prints are acceptable but must be marked NSFW)
-
No Ads / Spamming / Guerrilla Marketing
-
Do not create links to reddit
-
If you see an issue please flag it
-
No guns
-
No injury gore posts
If you need an easy way to host pictures, https://catbox.moe/ may be an option. Be ethical about what you post and donate if you are able or use this a lot. It is just an individual hosting content, not a company. The image embedding syntax for Lemmy is ![](URL)
Moderation policy: Light, mostly invisible
view the rest of the comments
Well, I toyed with the printer's temperature settings until I found a combination of nozzle temperature and bed temperature that finally made it spew out parts without making a disaster.
It seems to flow best at 260C, but then when it lands on the bed, it immediately shrinks as it cools and the part curls up and comes unstuck. I had to lower the temperature to 245C and raise the bed temperature to the maximum this printer does - 110C - for the part to stick enough to complete.
The nozzle clearly isn't hot enough because some layers on the final parts look like they're about to delaminate. But any hotter than that and the material curls up. And it doesn't matter what bed plate I use: that stuff doesn't seem to stick to anything properly.
I printed spectacles with that mystery filament. You can see how floppy it is here:
https://toobnix.org/w/qJJ1htb9eqmiHx7gSpq2RT
It looks like TPU alright, but the temperatures involved aren't really typical of TPU. Also, acetone does nothing to it whatsoever.
The material also doesn't like to be filed or sanded, and the best results for a nice finish without bits of material sticking out all over the place is to "polish" it by running a very sharp x-acto blade across the surface until all the junk is gone and the surface is shiny.
Weird filament. Kind of useless...
You might have some polypropylene there. Really strong material! Won’t stick to shit, temperature resistant, chemical resistant, can bend without breaking… never tried it, personally but it’s interesting stuff.
And notwithtanding that the damn stuff is around $78 for a kilo of filament! My other guess was polyethylene (HDPE). These two are pretty similar mechanically, both being polyolefins, but polypropylene melts at a higher temperature.
Yeah. PP doesn't stick at all to PEI print beds. Issue is Prusa neither sells HDPE or PP. Neither do they sell printer cable of Printing these materials (build surface).
For Polypropylene: e.g. Eryone is 26€ for 900g (should be more "length"/volume than 1kg of PLA). Fiberlogy is 50€/kg. Not that expensive without the Prusa tax.