PLA Filament Review

Posted by admin 04/03/2018 0 Comment(s) Product Review,
Below also (finally) a quick review of the filament I got last time and attached some pictures.
(I am contractually forbidden to share my prints for the client.)
But at least you’ll see what I have printed and all of them are “straight out of the printer” with just removing the supports, nothing else, no grinding or any post-work done on them.
 
The lamp is roughly 40 mm high, printed with 0.2 mm. The horse is printed with 0.2 mm nozzle and is roughly 15 cm high. The bust is roughly 20 cm high and printed with a 0.2 mm nozzle and the dragon is printed with a 0.4 mm nozzle and is around 30 cm high.
 
Printer : Raise 3D N2+. (build size 300x300x600. X,Y,Z)
Build plates : BuildTak, LokBuild and ordinary hardened glass, all with just some ordinary office glue stick on the bed.
For PLA I always use heated bed (around 55-60 °C) and for ABS I close the printer and use bed temperature of 110 C.
Professional use of the printer, running almost 24/7.
 
 
If you are used to print with higher temperature (215-220 °C) you have to rethink with this filament as this will print with considerable lower temperature (around 190 °C and even lower) to get the same result.
If you print higher it will generate a lot of stringing despite retraction settings.
 
The filament also have a tendency to generate shinier prints than my normal filament.
Been printing with both 0.2 and 0.4 mm nozzle and good result with both sizes however it is dead impossible to get a good raft with 0.2 mm nozzle on this filament (yet, not been “fibbling” around with too many settings yet as I only use raft on complex models with a lot of supports).
The colours are “true” throughout the full roll and with a setting of Z to 0.1 mm (or lower) you’ll have hard time to see the layers.
 
The only thing that has been a bit frustrating is that this filament is the friction, sometimes it has to struggle to get through the filament tube which resulted in that the feeder cannot pull through the filament in a good matter resulting in destroyed prints due to lack of feeding. (I got around this with a silicone spray directly on the filament roll)
 
This filament is very stable and I have hardly seen any shrinkage despite bigger models.
 
Conclusion : Very good filament for all-round use with low printing temperature and really good printing results. However you have to make sure the filament feeds correctly. (could probably be solved with a bit looser spooling when manufactured)
Mar.3, 2018  Jonas Mossberg
 
Feedback from SunTop: Thanks to Jonas's review on products bought in the middle of 2017, we noticed the friction issue and already made some improvement during manufacturing. 

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