Flexible Filament - Testing - Chris's Basement

today is all about flexible filament over the years I've had varying degrees of success when printing flexible filaments a lot of the newer printers and extruders nowadays have a lot better chance at succeeding with flexible filament than we did in the past but it can still be a somewhat challenging task now there's a lot of different types of flex that are available in a lot of different colors but the main thing that you want to look at when you're shopping for flexible filament is the shore hardness and that always didn't make a lot of sense to me but I found a lot of good graphics online that explain it a lot better than I probably can so let's take a look so this is the one that I found that actually makes the most sense to me and it's really easy to understand what's going on here most of the filament manufacturers are going to use the shore a scale because that's the hardest range that you're gonna see in a flexible filament now there are some brands that use the D scale but you're better off just converting that back to the a scale so it makes more sense when comparing it to other filament most flexible filaments that you're going to see are going to be anywhere from a sixty to a hundred so basically this video is just going to be me trying out a lot of different types of flexible filament and it's not going to be about the quality of the print that we get it's going to be about if we can get a print out of it at all and I have a pretty wide range of different flex here and we're going to do all these prints on the perusal mark three because it does have bond tech gears that grab the filament from both sides and a really short filament path let me show you what that looks like on the mark three you have the motor that's directly driving one of the bond tech gears the one inside and then on the door it comes down to meet that gear and it also gets driven at the same time by that year that's on the motor shaft so filament comes in here from the top it meets those gears it grips it on both sides so it has less of a chance of getting loose I have had flexible come around this gear and get sucked up and actually go over it but hopefully that doesn't happen a whole lot today it depends on how hard it is to get that filament off the spool you definitely want a free spool when you're trying to run flexible on one of these extruder bodies if the filament starts to tug at all you're gonna see issues also the filament path on the mark 3's extruder body is shorter than ever even shorter than it was on the mark 3 so the PTFE tube you can see it right there that goes all the way down into the hot end just to feed that filament to the throat it's a fairly short distance so you should be able to print quite a few different flexibles on this extruder body so with those gears and the shorter filament path the mark 3 should be able to succeed on most types of flexible filament but that's what we're gonna find out in this video now before we get started printing let's check out all the different filaments we're gonna try and their specifications first up we just have some generic inland brand from micro centered TPE this is the filament that I always recommend you try if you're just getting into flexible filament they don't even give you a shortness rating but it's not super flexible it is somewhat rigid but it's more than flexible enough to make things like gaskets if you wanted to plus it's very affordable you don't have to spend a lot to try some flexible filament out then we have treed flexibility this actually was a sample that came when one of the maker boxes they rake this stuff at a 70 for a and it is super flexible it's like rubber bands not the most flexible I've seen but this could be a challenge then we have this fiber ology fiber flex filament they rate this at around a forty D so it's a fairly rigid flexible filament it shouldn't be that hard to print you can stretch it just a bit but it's definitely not as stretchy as a lot of them that we see then when you have some filament 'im flex fill this is a 98 a this is pretty rigid filament it is somewhat flexible but it almost feels like you could break it it's really close to the same consistency of a PLA but it doesn't snap so 98a should be fairly easy to print and then we have some good old ninjaflex now I say that because ninjaflex is a lot of the times what people say when they're referring to flexible filament ninjaflex is an 85 a short hardness so it's definitely pretty flexible stuff you can stretch it quite a bit but it does kind of have a hard outer shell that a lot of the flexibles don't so it's going to print just a little bit different than some of the others it's almost like it's textured so we'll see how that goes then we have some Kodak flex 98 it's pretty much the same as the fire biology Flex Vil it's gonna be a 98 a short hardness shouldn't be that difficult to print but we'll give it a try we also have some ninja flex eel this is conductive TPU after we print it let's take a reading on it just for fun and this is a ninety a short hardness there's a little bit of flex to it it's pretty comparable to this inland TPE can't flex it too much but you can definitely make a lot of stuff out of it if you need some flex in your parts and last but not least the master disaster this is X 60 filament from die base yes it has a 60 a short hardness and this stuff might as well be spaghetti you can wrap it around you can do pretty much anything with this except printed probably but we'll check that out and to give you an idea of the quality that we can get out of these flexible filaments these are some prints that I did before this is the treed flexibility filament remember that's around a 70 for a it's very flexi and then this is the inland TPE not near as flexible and you can tell between the two that a retraction does a lot better job on this side because this one's quite a bit stiffer and it's a lot more efficient when it's trying to pull it back a lot of times depending on your extruder if you're printing different flexes you don't want any retraction at all because it's probably not going to do you any good and it's going to hurt you in the long run but on most machines you're not going to be able to achieve the same kinds of things you could with other filaments without lots and lots of tuning or maybe swapping out your extruder to give you an idea I did this overhang test on the mark 3 with that inland TPE you can see this is 45 if you take a look at the back anything more than that it kind of turns into a disaster so there's all the filaments and we're almost ready to print about a couple of tips if you're trying to print flexible depending on your bed surface if you're using something like a Pei sheet you're going to want to put something on there like glue stick as a separation layer because pretty much all flexibles are gonna adhere to that permanently and you're not going to be able to get it off these powder coated sheets like the ones Prusa offers work great for flexible filament you can pop it right off after they cool down also you might want to back up your first layer a little bit maybe print just a little bit higher than you would for other filaments of course you will have to slow down and like I said before retraction is going to be important the more flexible the filament is the less you're going to be able to use retraction because it's not going to do you any good and it'll probably just cause a jam so with all that said let's get to some prints [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so while you're watching the time-lapse it's also important to mention that a lot of flexible filament is very hygroscopic so it's gonna collect moisture if it's just sitting around especially in keeping environments so I recommend mean you're not printing with it stored in one of your drive oxes with desiccant to keep it as fresh as possible for as long as possible you can also use a food dehydrator unflexible the same rules apply for PLA that it does with most flex filaments you don't want to get it too hot you definitely don't want to use it on your car - or something like that because it will doubt now [Music] [Music] and that was a long couple of days I had a lot of failures trying to test this flexible filament but I also had some success so let's check out the results so let's start with the inland TPE this is the cheapest filament of the bunch and it is really the one that I recommend if you want to try some flexible filament this was my overhang test that I showed earlier but this kind of shows you just how flexible it is this is 10% infill I print this stuff at 210 with a 60-degree bed I do print it on the powder-coated Pei sheet and I print it at Cruces default speeds and that's pretty quick actually I printed at a hundred percent feed rate I don't do any tweaking to the printer it will just print as is also flexible either like schooling or a doesn't like cooling inland you can go both ways this one is with cooling off you can see it didn't do the smokestack very well and this one is with cooling on the smokestack came out a lot better but it did add a little bit of stringing to it retraction on that filament and the overhang isn't all that great the little vase mode prints turn out really squishy this is the one from the top of the video and it looks really good next we have our filament inflex filled CPU 98a this stuff is pretty hard filament all of these I did a flexible bar it's just a little bar that's 10% filament but if I tap on the table you can hear it's almost a solidus PLA but it does have some flex to it it's pretty hard to flex I printed this one at 240 with a 50 degree bed it did like to print a little bit hotter I printed it on the powder coated sheet it did seem to stick well but it did have quite a few failures when I first started printing with this material I just couldn't print as fast as I could with that inland TPE I'm not sure why because this flexible is pretty rigid but I had to lower the speed of the printer to get some successful prints kind of the same thing with the cooling you can see this one no cooling at all this one was full cooling but the stringing got a lot worse the base model is pretty rigid so here you can see the failure that I'm talking about with this filament that pretty common to see with flexible it just can't push it into the hot end because you're probably going too fast and it just rolls past the feeder gear you can see it here in the idler door and just a quick note on speed when I give you these values and percentages I'm using the stock Prusa profile from pre slicer with a point to layer height for flexible filament and I'm adjusting the temperatures any speed adjustment that I make I'm just adjusting it right here and you can see the feed rate a hundred percent right here I'm just running that down to the percentage that I think where it's printing well most of these I did sixty percent and the X 60 I did a forty percent just to give you an idea of what I'm doing to slow down those prints I thought it was just a little more consistent this way than creating new profiles next up we have the fiber ology from Wolf Works 3d they say that this is a 40 d hardness they call it fiber flex and I had a really hard time with this filament especially when trying to get it to stick to the bed this one I printed a little cooler at 210 and the bed was at 50 C but I actually had to switch over to the smooth Pei sheet to get this to stick and stay down that's not a quality of flex that I usually see everything else usually sticks like glue so this one's kind of unusual I didn't have a very large sample so I couldn't try multiple tests but I did have lots of failures with this filament the Banshee really didn't come out any good at all you can see some of the other filament has bled into it so don't count that against it but it just didn't print that well and the bar is the same way you can see this stuff is really flexible it has a lot of spring to it this is some pretty unusual filament I didn't have a whole lot of luck with it but maybe if I can get some more I might give it another try and then we have our ninja flex from Ninja Tech this is probably the most common flexible filament a lot of people refer to flexible filament as ninja Plex and I have to say out of all the filaments this is the most flexible that turned out the best again I did Ben cheese where there's no cooling and with full cooling this guy had no cooling you can see the overhang there this one had full cooling and by far this is the best pinchy that I got out of all the flexible it turned out really well also I just kind of like the texture of the ninjaflex it's a little bit rougher coated it's pretty nice this is still really flexible remember this is an 85 a short hardness and here's the flexible bar it bends real easy I printed all these in the powder coated sheet running at about 230 degrees on the nozzle 50 degrees on the bed and I lower the feed rate down to 60% super happy with how the ninja Plex came out and then we have the kodak flexible filament it is rated at a 98 a there's really nothing special about this it does have kind of an odd pattern on the outside of the models but I think that's because of the condition of the filament the filament looked almost a little melted when I pulled it out of the box maybe it got a little bit too hot while it was shipping I'm not sure the bench is pretty subpar a lot of stringing the overhang does look good this is with no cooling I didn't even try with cooling because I really wasn't impressed with this filament the bar somewhat flexible this is a pretty rigid flex you can see with the base it's pretty hard to squish it doesn't just flatten right down so it's an okay filament but not my favorite and then we have the ninja tech yield filament this is the stuff that's conductive it's pretty hard to print my results didn't turn out really well I didn't have a very big sample to try it out so maybe I need to do some more testing but up here in the vase model as it started to get towards the top it started to separate like it was gonna jam and you can see kind of from the bar it is fairly flexible I did run this at 230 C with a 50 degree bed and I lowered it down to 60% feed rate I got some results but I'm not super happy with him but let's see just how conductive this stuff is real quick so this 80 millimeter bar has 10% infill and it's setting around 715 720 ohms so the resistance is kind of high but it might be good enough for small projects that might be something we have the test in the future then we go to our trade flexibility TPA and man this stuff is hard to print it is just really flexible filament it's even hard to feed into the feeder gears to get the filament sensor to trigger I printed this one at 240 C on the nozzle 50 degree on the bed they do recommend going higher on the bed temp but using the powder coated sheet this stuff stuck like crazy it was super prone to jamming I got about a half a Vinci and then I did finally get a full Vinci again my sample size was pretty small the vase was so flexible as they'd get around a certain point the nozzle would push it to the side and it wouldn't even complete I pulled the bar test off a little bit too soon so it is permanently deformed this stuff is just crazy flex the benches you can almost squash them all the way to the ground this was printed at 60% speed but I probably should have done a little bit slower would have had a little bit more success a very nice color a pretty nice filament but boy it's a challenge I definitely want to get a hold of some more of this and give it a try on some of the other extruders and last but not least we have the X 60 filament and when they say this is flexible they're not kidding this is almost like rubber glove material here this is the most success that I had I can't believe I even got the whole done but it was pretty much just piling it up like frosting by the time it was finished I tried this probably a dozen times before I got this result I printed this at a 40% feed rate to 10 on the nozzle 50 degree on the bed it did stick to the powder coated sheet just fine but this is not something that you want to use for your projects unless you are set up to print flex filament in fact I don't even know that they still make this x60 anymore it might have been discontinued I did manage to get 200 grams but it's still gonna need another test on some of the more advanced flexible extruders and just to show you one of my other failures this happened I don't know how many times again the filament is so flexible you can barely feed it into the extruder body it took me 5 or 6 times to get the gears to even grip it so some of the flexible filament worked out a little better than the others but as with all filament that's going to be determined a lot on your slicer settings and the speed that you print at so why are we doing all this flex testing well I have a couple of different extra that are specifically designed for flexible filament and I wanted to get a good baseline on a lot of this flex before I started testing those and given the person mark 3 has Montague gears it's usually a pretty good candidate for a baseline test like this so in future videos I would like to achieve PLA quality with even the most flexible x60 filament but that will be in future videos hopefully you found this helpful if you did please consider giving it a thumbs up or subscribing to my channel if not leave your thoughts in the comments below and as always thanks for watching

Channel: Chris Riley

Views: 22,569

Keywords: 3D, printer, Printing, 3D Printing, 3D Printer, ChrisBasement, ChrissBasement, Chris'sBasement, Chris Basement, Chriss Basement, Chris's Basement, ChrisRiley, Chris Riley, benchy, 3dbenchy, 3d, extruder, hemera, dropeffect, flexible, filament, flexible filament, prusa mk3, mk3, prusa, Flexible Filament - Testing - Chris's Basement

Id: KZ1HRaL6Lg0

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 08 2020