Complete Guide to Filament for FDM 3d Printers

this Irv Shapiro with the doctor backs Channel and today we're going to help you make one of the many decisions you need to make when you're beginning to use a 3d printer and that is what filament should you buy if you've used a 3d printer for a long time what filament should you use for a particular model should you use PLA or PPG or a BS or a sa orko polyester or maybe nylon can you even print with nylon in your printer and then you have companies like color fab that name their filaments completely differently color fab xt used to print this semi clear vase it's a beautiful filament what is it so today we're going to help you answer those questions whether you're printing a dragon or you're printing a phone case what should you be using as your filament stay tuned and let's learn something together now before we start talking about the individual materials PLA PE TG others let's talk about what you see on a website when you go to buy filament and most people today by their filament online so let's look at this picture together what you see here is the start of color that's obvious however each company is going to have slightly different names and they may have prefixes on the name they may say it's a silk filament silk filaments tend to be rather shiny this is a silk gold from cc3 China one of my favorite filaments the color may be rated with a standard color grade most aren't but it's possible and in fact unfortunately the picture on the website may not look exactly like the filament color so the only way to really know precisely the color is to have a sample or buy some of that filament next we're going to look at diameter diameter is most often 1.75 or 2.85 now some filament manufacturers list the 2.85 as 3 and it makes a difference so the only way to know for sure once again is to measure it yourself and you would use a caliper to do that when you first use a caliper you've turn it on make sure you hit the button that's a zero so that you've reset it so it's zero and then you can see in a close-up picture this happens to measure right here one point seven two however if I measure it somewhere else now it's one point seven one and down here it's one point six nine so what's going on well you pay for precision filaments in general they have a closer diameter tolerance are more expensive most of the filaments sold today is pretty good and it ranges from a tolerance of 0.05 to 0.02 why does that matter well when you're extruding filament the variation in the diameter will cause a variation in the amount of filament that's extruded if the variation is too wide you'll get under extrusion or over extrusion one of the things that I find very interesting is that people generally seem to want to print at the smallest possible layer height I want to print it the largest layer height that's acceptable for that print you know I'm making a bracket that no one's gonna see I don't really care that it's ugly if I'm making a piece of jewelry or something with fine lettering that people are gonna see maybe I'll print it at 0.15 or 0.1 oh so layer height matters and the diameter tolerance of the filament will impact the quality of your layers next let's look what we have here you'll have a recommended printing temperature and recommended printing speed now those are guidelines I very often print above the recommended printing temperature if in particular I'm using a large nozzle or I want to print very fast why when you want to print very fast your filament has less time in the melt zone of your hot end so if you set the overall temperature hotter you're more likely to completely melt that filament you'll then have another parameter that's not shown in this example but that's the glass transition temperature it's basically and this is an oversimplification I apologize to the chemists and the material scientists but it's basically the temperature it starts to get soft pliable that's important because if you're going to leave your filament in the car and the cars gonna get up to 120 degrees in the Sun you don't want your coat bracket over the backseat to begin bending down and drop your coat on the floor so you need to understand glass transition temperature generally if the print temperature is higher the glass transition temperature will be higher next you'll see the weight and the diameter of the spool in general many spools have 1 kilogram approximately a filament and the spools generally weigh about 250 grams why is it important if you weigh your filament spool before you go to print and you subtract 250 grams or you know exactly how much in empties filament spool weighs then you can compare that your slicer parameters and determine whether you have enough filament left to print and finally you'll see something called Shore hardness that's basically how flexible is your filament so some filaments this happens to be a filament called PLA and PLA is not really very flexible yes you can bend it but if you bend it too far it will crack or break on the other hand this filament here is TPU and it's very very flexible now there's an even more flexible filament called ninjaflex which is really flexible so the Shore hardness is important there's an inverse relationship however the more flexible your filament the harder it is to print with why because you have a couple gears that are loading your filament into your extruder maybe they're loading it through a long tube through a Bowden tube maybe the gears are directly on top of the extruder a direct extruder printer but the more distance between those gears and your print mechanism the more likely that flexible filament will get compressed or stretched the more likely that flexible filament will flow outside of the correct path if you have a gear and then you of your Bowden tube and there's a big gap there that filament might end up outside your Bowden - so flexible filament is much harder to print with it also impacto matically retraction settings so sure hardness is important next when you buy filament what do you get well generally you get a box most often it looks like this not always sometimes it just comes in a bag inside almost every single time you'll see your filaments in a plastic bag that has had all the air sucked out of it now this one I already opened what's unique about cc3 China is they actually give you resealable bags which is really very very nice and then the next thing you're going to want to look at is how well the winding is on the reel the more unifier the winding the less likely your filament will Jam when it goes to pull it off the reel in a real where the winding is terrible you're likely to get more jams which is why every single time you're done using your filament you need to stick it back into the holes on the side of the reel and pull it tight you know you're gonna waste a little filament so it stays in a nice wined many filaments will absorb moisture from the air so you want to keep these either in a sealed bag or a sealed container or potentially even a sealed container of some type of dehumidifier in it let's take a look for a minute at this table of filament we're going to cover PLA ABS PE PG Chi PU Co polyester nylon and filled filaments and I'm going to look at some examples and talk about the characteristics so let's begin with PLA if you don't know what filament to use use PLA it's by far the easiest filament there is to use many of the samples up here were printed in PLA and interestingly PLA is in fact one of the strongest filaments you can print with now PLA is not very flexible in fact depending on the PLA when you take and you go to bend it it may crack this happens to be hatch box PLA which is not too bad it is a little bit flexible the less plan scible it is the more brittle it is the more likely it will snap so PLA tends to be very strong but when it gets to its breaking point it just snaps instead of bends on the other extreme you'll have a filament like nylon which is not actually quite as strong as PLA but it's very flexible so it tends to bend instead of snapping PLA generally prints at about 180 degrees 200 degrees I often print it at 206 degrees it can be printed either in a fully enclosed printer or an open printer if it's a fully enclosed printer and the fans on the extruder and hotend are not excellent the PLA actually stay to warm and you'll have difficulty with it so you'll have to open the doors so if you're using a fully enclosed printer with PLA make sure you have great fans in that printer or just open the doors so PLI should be in general your go to filament it's by far the easiest to print with the next filament abs and and by the way I'm not even going to attempt to give you the long chemical names for each of these filaments most people at least in the hobbyist industry just refer to them by their acronyms abs and I don't have a sample of abs here cuz I don't generally print with it abs unlike PLA gives off fumes when you print with it PLA does not give off fumes or not significant food fumes PLA is made from bio stock made from very often corn it's biodegradable abs is serve nasty plastic however in its solid form it's safe but when you melt it it's a little more volatile abs is used in common toys such as Legos and the reason a lot of things are made out of ABS is it requires a relatively high temperature to print let's look at our table ApS prints at about 215 to 240 degrees Celsius that compares to about 180 to 210 for PLA the glass transition temperature is almost double and that's why abs is a good material to use if you're going to use it for something in a closed car in a warm climate however because of the fumes and because it requires that you keep it at a relatively high temperature while you're printing it otherwise it will start to shrink a bit and that will cause it to warp you almost always have to print abs in an enclosed printer so if you don't have an enclosed printer you can print abs but the more consistent you keep the temperature the better it'll be so ABS might be the most difficult or almost the most difficult nylons pretty difficult to material to print with on this chart in addition the next filament listed on the table let's look at it now PE TG is a wonderful replacement for ABS in many settings so my go-to filaments are PLA and PE TG you'll see here that PD TG prints a little bit hotter but it prints under 250 degrees Celsius many consumer grade printers have a limit of 250 degrees Celsius and therefore P TG is still a good choice it does require a heated print bed in fact PLA that easy to useful one does not you put a little glue stick or magic goo on your print pad you can print without a heated print bed PT GE does require him that heated print bed is a little more sensitive to environmental temperatures and in fact you have to be careful because it will stick to the print bed really well and so very often I will spray rub a little Windex on my print bed before I use PE TG that helps it to release because it leaves a thin film of soap on the printbed it is not quite as strong in strength tests I've done as PLA it's almost as good but it's much more flexible so for many environments it will seem stronger because if you just go to pull on PLA it'll hold more weight but if you go to bend it and flex it it will more likely because it's brittle snap before PEP Gigi will now the next filament we're going to talk about is TPU TPU is used when you want to print things that are flexible most phone cases are made out of TPU as I shared before the flexibility rating of TPU is called Shore hardness let's look at this table and you'll get an idea of Shore hardness so gummy bears are really flexible they would be on the far left of this table sure hardness has three different scales zero zero a and D and we're generally printing with materials in the a scale that are between about eighty and a hundred so we're printing those materials in a relatively narrow range TPU is will range from around 80 to 90 and the harder TP use are easier to print so I'm a big fan of Saint smart TPU because I find it really pretty easy to print it's still pretty flexible a lot of people like ninjaflex it's a brand name it's extremely flexible this was printed in ninjaflex and it's just like almost like a rubber band whereas these were printed insane smart TPU and they're flexible but they're clearly firmer so TPU is the go-to filament if you want flexibility now there are new filaments such as manner hackers has a new filament i've been tried yet called soft PLA the our PLA s which are easier to print which have been modified to make them more flexible I'm looking forward to trying soft PLA for a phone case because if you print a phone case out of traditional PLA this one actually was for now no PLA and you'll see the picture here you can't get the phone in because you can't bend it at all to slide the phone in so I'm gonna try soft PLA to see if that'll be printable on a wider range of printers the general rule is soft TP use can only be printed on direct extruder printers now that's not universally true but it's easier to print soft TP use on direct extruder printers next let's talk about Co polyesters Co polyesters are more complex plastics they're often look like some of the plastics we see every day and they have often unique characteristics so this happens to me colorful XT which is a co polyester and you'll notice it's really pretty clear I think this was a wonderful wonderful material but it does print a little hotter I often print this at somewhere between 240 and 260 degrees Celsius now that also means that it's glass transition temperature is going to be a little hotter so if we look at the temperature here it's at 75 that's 50% hotter than PLA it is good strength and but it is only a little bit flexible a little more flexible than PLA not as brittle but it is good strength and I like to use it for specialty items such as semi clear vases next on the list is Nylund now line line requires a heated print bed that can get to a relatively high temperature about 70 C or higher it prints in a very high temperature so generally prints at about 250 to 270 degrees Celsius that means many printers in the consumer area cannot print that I only have one printer that can print at those temperatures reliably and safely and that's my Prusa i3 MK 3 finally let's talk about some very interesting filaments filaments where they combine a thermoplastic a plastic that can melt with a non plastic so this is color fab Woodfill and literally when you take and print with this it smells like burning lumber filled materials generally are more abrasive to the nozzle on your hot end and therefore you often will use a steel a hardened steel nozzle I actually have a Ruby nozzle and my Prusa for printing filled filaments now Woodfill is not very abrasive but it is a little tricky to print with in general you have to print slower with filled filaments and you have to fine-tune the temperature settings to get them just right when you do you produce beautiful things so this is a bread knife this is a wood fill handle that I then stained with traditional wood stain it's beautiful it's beautiful this one is even more interesting so this was printed with color fab Bronzeville it's really heavy it feels like bronze and then I buffed it on a buffing wheel like you would buff bronze so filled filaments are very very interesting they're also used to add strength so they're carbon fiber filled filaments there are glass filled filaments so fill filaments are really on the new bleeding edge of filament chemistry and I think you're going to see combinations of thermoplastics and a wide range of materials producing unique materials that can be printed on an FDM printer let's go back to our table and wrap up PLA that should be your go-to filament it's by far the easiest to print with ABS I don't recommend printing with ABS at all unless you're in a well-ventilated area and you have a fully enclosed printer so if you have a industrial use for abs where you need the high glass transition point great otherwise I don't remember commend it if you need a higher glass transition point than PLA I recommend PE TG it is almost as either print width as PLA however it will stick to your print bed really well so I recommend the little Windex on the print bed before you print with it TPU is the generic plastic behind many flexible filaments Co polyesters are often unique materials I like to use the color fab xt material for printing vases nylon is really strong it because it's wear resistant it may not actually be as strong in brute strength as PLA but it's extremely strong because it's wear resistant it's not brittle and it has a low friction coefficient that means it's very slippery and smooth and then filled filaments are just very very interesting so go to filament PLA the next filament for things that need higher temperatures PE TG everything else is pretty much a special case in my opinion well folks I hope this was useful and got you started along the journey I encourage you to experiment with filaments except for maybe abs unless you have a well ventilated environment and if you did learn something today give me a thumbs up subscribe to the channel more importantly post links to this video everywhere you can think of help me grow this channel so we can do even more exciting videos where continue to learn things together [Music]

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 50,542

Keywords: filament, 3d printer projects, 3d printing nerd, 3d printer, 3d printer in action, 3d printers, 3d printing, 3d printing videos youtube, additive manufacturing, how to 3d print, what is 3d printing, what is 3d printing technology, 3d printer filament types, pla vs petg vs abs, PLA vs, 3d printing for beginners, pla filament storage, 3d filament types, pla, pla filament, 3d print, abs, tpu, 3d printers for beginners, flexible filament, fdm, petg, glass transition temperature

Id: _F031G2mdPo

Length: 24min 22sec (1462 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2019