3D Printer filaments 2

July 22, 2015

I finally have gone through a few rolls of filament on my Craftbot and since I'm almost out, I needed to get some more. The micro center filament I get seems fine and it was the lowest priced filament I could find that seems to work. I have now found that the online site Hobby King also carries filament. They didn't before but as the 3D Printers have become more and more common we are seeing this industry spread like wild fire which is a good thing for the buyers. They carry a brand by e-sun. I have never used it but read a few reviews and so far it looked okay so I thought I give them a try since the prices were even lower than micro center, between 9 and 11 or so dollars for 1KG roll. They also have warehouses all over the globe and since I just order online it doesn't matter where it comes from as long as the price is right and the filament works. I have gone through about 9 or 10 rolls now and have nothing much to show for in terms of prints. So watching these prices go down is a very good thing. Needless to say I will now be testing some of this filament and hope it works as well as the Inland but with the lower price as this stuff can add up very fast. You can find it here and should be able to get some around the world depending on where you are.

http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/RC_PRODUCT_SEARCH.asp?strSearch=filament+1kg

So here are the pictures of this filament.

 

 

August 2, 2015

I finally got a chance to start using one of these filaments and I can say that it works just as well as the inland. Extrudes without any problem too. So if they they keep the low prices, I will be using this one instead of the inland as it costs even less than that. I'm just glad to see prices going lower on these things. It takes a long time to get anything usable so you end up wasting quite a bit of it so that's never a good thing.

I may have spoken too soon. The other user of this filament had mentioned how his filament would break. He also said his filament was old. I just noticed this on my new filament. I either got an old one or this filament is a bit on the brittle side. Only time will tell and I will update later. For  now here are a few pictures I just took. I just used this filament yesterday and I know it was not like this. I haven't touched the machine since I stopped printing yesterday.

August 3, 2015

I just started a new test print I'm doing and heard a snap. I turned around and sure enough, the filament broke again. Remember, this is a new roll and my first of six rolls. I still haven't even opened any other.

August 4, 2015

I decided to test out the blue luminous filament. The filament prints a light gray color. So it does not print blue. Just like what you see in the pictures. It also does not glow well, if at all. I put the part next to the lamp and I still barely see it and a light blue when I turn it off.  My inland part glows in the dark as soon as I turn the lamp off. I can even do an on and off really quick and it will glow really well. The e-sun filament not so much. It barely glows. The only thing that seems fine is that it's extruding fine. If you want glow in the dark use the inland brand or something else.

 

Even with light shining through the part, the e-sun filament doesn't glow. I had just turned of my desk lamp here. As you can see the inland does glow like it's supposed to.

Update October 9, 2015

I finally got through using most of the e-sun filament and although it worked okay for the most part, it tends to break more often than I would like. For this reason I can't recommend this brand.

I just did a large part with the blue glow in the dark since it's what I had and I just wanted to use it. I won't recommend making large parts with any of the glow in the dark filaments, they are just too brittle and the parts don't look as smooth as any regular PLA. I have found some uses for it, but not too many.

Here's the part I am working on.

 The glow in the dark filaments melt a bit faster than your regular PLA which is fine, but you get more of this sort of stringing. I'm still working on getting rid of this so this is an extreme case and has more to do with my settings too.

 Here's one of the problems you will encounter if you do print large parts with any glow in the dark filament. I was trying to remove that extra support and then this side broke. So any parts with a lot of details are hard to clean up without breaking other parts. It's just not good making too many parts with details.

 As you can see it's also very coarse so your parts won't look that great. I was using . 25 mm layer height here.

I'm also still not having much luck getting all these holes to print completely clean or at least easier to clean off.

I do have some of this so called blue glow in the dark left that I know I can use for something else and one ABS which was practically impossible for me to use on my craftbot since it won't heat up as much as it needs to be. I also have one other roll left so I'll use this to make this part again even thought this actually took over one day to print. But you can't learn until you try it.