The 3D Filament Tier List: Which Spools Rule?

if you've got a 3D printer you can choose between hundreds of different filaments with all kinds of different properties from tough as nails to fluffy as a cloud Rock Solid to floppier than a rubber band I've tried over 300 filaments so far but which ones should you have in your Workshop let's sort the cash from the trash and find the spools that rule today at voidstar lab ladies gentlemen and cyborgs this was supposed to be the grand finale to my every filament series but somewhere between the Cannabis scented TPU the radiation blocking PG and the pla mixed with crushed up Wimbledon Tennis Courts I had an epiphany the weirdest rarest filaments ever conceived by humankind are probably not in the running for your next project so I sifted through those filaments to find the most popular iconic and useful 3D printing materials that every maker should know about and I graded them on this tier list which itself is 3D printed at the top is s tier if at all possible you should design your project specifically to use one of these filaments that's how good they are at the bottom is f tier they suck so fundamentally none of these are even worth considering in between are tiers a b and c and The Wider a variety of projects filament makes possible and the more its pros outweigh its cons the higher rank it gets this five-fold filament free-for-all is sponsored by Aura your ally Against The Reptilian Corporation selling your docs to any scumbag with a credit card I Googled myself the other night don't judge me everyone does it you know what I found my wife my phone number even my wife's phone number number I'm sorry folks she's taken but a whole 35 years of our personal info email addresses and even real addresses were all there for the buying we don't share this stuff our sell carriers Banks and basically every company we've ever done business with sold us out to data Brokers we got lucky this could have included health records wages even family trees some of these so-called personal data were even outright lies I have never been to court I hide all the witnesses in my chest freezer but if someone coughed up 95 cents these bogus Court filings might as well be real here in the US it's your right to tell a data broker no you can't sell my phone number to stalkers and they are legally required to purge your info but there are thousands of these psychos who could find them all file all those documents and keep checking in case they just put your data back up Aura can Aura automatically bombards data Brokers with opt out requests on your behalf they can watch your credit score identity usage and your House's title they can even notify you when your data appear on the dark West you get the whole shmear plus an antivirus password manager and VPN for one single low rate so who is selling your secrets visit aa.com Zack Freedman for a free two-e trial take yourself off the market at the link in the description I put it there along with all the printable stls for the tier list I had to put them up myself if I didn't have Aura I could have just waited for someone else to leak them for me anyways let's print some boats without further Ado the reigning king of additive manufacturing pla poly laac toas acid is super easy to print it's dirt cheap and you can buy it anywhere in more colors than your tasteless retinas deserve pla prints extremely fast it excels at Bridges and overhangs and if your settings are good it's really easy to detach it from supports pla is just good at getting what's on screen into the real world it's also the stiffest non-composite thermoplastic and has excellent tensil strength it's a lot more rugged than you'd think of film it that cheap should be just be aware if you weigh it down overtighten a screw or otherwise is put a consistent load on it pla will slowly but permanently creep out of shape pla's ease of use low cost and solid performance make it the first choice from pretty much every job but I'm still going to put it in a tier the fact is it just can't stand up to the real world it softens on a hot day just gets ranched by the sun's ultraviolet light and shatters when you drop it you also can't really sand glue paint or otherwise touch it up after printing now there are ways to improve on Perfection and this next filament is not one of them silk pla has a special additive that makes your prints cartoonishly shiny this stuff is more metallic than actual metal this weakens the print but it makes supports a lot easier to remove and since silk pla literally shines in show pieces I think this is a fair trade but just keep an eye on your printer when silk pla heats up it puffs up like popcorn so if your extruder fan is sucking hot air or you're doing multimaterial single nozzle prints silk pla can easily give your extrior a monster mamama Jam silk pla sacrifices performance for Aesthetics but in its defense those Aesthetics are really aesthetic because silk pla will absolutely trash both a bamboo AMS and a Pia mmu I'm going to put it in B tier B for B Pia and bamboo Labs the two genders our next filament is our first composite carbon fiber pla CF is a common additive in all kinds of materials but this isn't the sexy weave that soups up Street Racers these fibers have to be chopped short or even ground to powder to fit through the nozzle carbon fiber won't make your print any stronger or lighter but it does sharpen details it stabilizes the filament as it cools and it makes the end product stiffer but more brittle this Wombo Combo of crisp details low shrinkage and matte finish makes CFA one of the best looking most accurate filaments you can print with really the only reasons to use vanilla pla are to avoid having to install a hardened steel nozzle and to get different colors neither of these are valid because a nozzle swap is easy and cheap and black is the color code of cool that's why the cast iron skillet is the coolest Skillet I'm going to put cfpl in s tier for skillet so stupid s for stupid so what about a composite with metal infusing or prints with metal shavings makes them satisfyingly Hefty and adds a little bit of their properties copper will develop a green patina stainless steel can be polished iron is magnetic you get the idea the metal doesn't make the filament any stronger the stuff is is actually significantly weaker than vanilla unfortunately metal filed filaments are extremely brittle on and off the spool and they are crazy expensive you pay far more per gram and because the filament is so high density you get fewer prints per gram anything these can do you could do better with a regular filament and a coat of paint some inserts or even some electr plating I'm going to put the entire category of metal composits in F our next filament is even less useful but it's way more char in Wood pla this is plastic plus sawdust and your mileage will vary crappy wood pla has such finely powdered plant product it's just regular pla but Brown and worse quality wood pla has visible chips and that's the kind I'm talking about here wood pla is not very pleasant to print it spurts and sputters especially after absorbing humidity which it does very easily the end product is also a lot weaker but the soft springy surface really does feel like hardwood and while it doesn't really the part if you hit it with some varnish the wood grain effect is surprisingly convincing the lower quality the print the more convincing the effect I'm going to put wood pla in B tier B bamboo which is the most common wood in Wood filament even though it's a grass false advertising where's the fing SEC these are pla Alloys pla improved by mixing in another type of plastic these are sold under a wide variety of meaningless overlapping and confusing names like pla Pro pla plus rugged PLA and just infinite more there are three main formulas I'm going to call the first kind tough pla remember I don't mean spools labeled tough pla what I'm talking about is a combination of PLA and polybutene talate or PBT if you're a mechanical keyboard nerd you have probably seen PBT key caps they're incredibly tough and slightly flexible which is a great set of properties for covering pla's weaknesses this Wombo Combo prints and acts just like pla except it resists higher temperatures handles sharper impacts and it won't shatter when it's overloaded tough pla is a solid s tier just a straight upgrade and a superior choice for pretty much every light duty project the second kind is matte pla this is actually a composite but unlike nozzle destroying crap shards this additive is some kind of plant pulp the soft fibers give your prints a springy satin surface and even makes them sound soft this stuff can be dropped struck and unlike other pla sanded painted and carved but this absorbs humidity faster and it's much more likely to jam and grind in the extruder this is also a semiflexible filament which is just not what you're looking for for many projects I'm going to put Matt pla in B tier because it's more of a situational side grid to regular pla the third is high-speed pla a dubious name for what's a genuinely useful filament you can run regular pla pretty quick but above 300 mm a second you just can't force enough pure pla through the hot end to keep up with the motion system system high-speed pla melts at a lower temperature and has a reduced viscosity so you can crank that hog to table wobbling turbo speed considering how little heat it takes to soften normal pla this can be a real problem in hot climates still I'm going to put highp speed pla an S tier s for Speed there is just nothing more important than finishing projects faster a few hours can make all the difference of course you only get those hours if regular pla is holding your printer back from rolling around at the speed of sound got places to go got to follow your rainbow rainbows are arcs arcs are bent and you can bend Flex pla s tier segue I'm including this for historical reasons because Flex pla has nothing to do with pla it's makerbot's inexplicable brand name for polycaprolactone this stuff doesn't normally look this crappy this sample was donated by Ren from our Discord after sitting in their closet for like 9 years here's what a brand new spool of PCL prints like PCL is the second lowest temperature material on this list it prints at only 100 IUS and softens in a warm bath this stuff has a translucent waxy consistency that no adhesive will ever stick to in fact you can use PCL as an adhesive shap lock instamorph and other sculptable Plastics are just pellets of PCL this filament is particularly useful for Prosthetics because you can use a hair dryer to Contour a model to fit the wearer even while they're still wearing it pcl's ridiculous low temperatures can be genuinely hard to print but I'm still going to put in B tier cuz where it's good it's down right life changing next up is petg and this is the opposite supremely versatile never really exceptional this stuff is a little bit harder to print than pla but it's tougher it handles higher temperatures and it generally survives a lot more real world punishment PG is also one of the most transparent polymers and has one of the lowest coefficients of friction you can get clear Slicker filaments but they are way harder to print petg does have problems especially when it comes to overhangs Bridges will just s like crazy and supports won't release it's not very difficult to design around this but if you're mostly printing other people's models PG can cause more harm than good it also absorbs water pretty fast so the more humid your climate the faster you want to finish a spool PG belongs in a tier a step up from pla now add some carbon and you are really cooking carbon fiber stabilize molten filament and PG's biggest weakness is how it sags and warps as it prints cfpg is a major step up in stability and support quality plus the fiber stiffen what's otherwise a pretty bendy polymer polyester tends to have shiny walls so every cfpg print looks glorious cfpg deserves a spot in s tier it is almost always the ideal choice for functional prototypes I wouldn't say it's exceptional at anything but it's very very good at everything that matters but allow me to introduce PG's younger better brother poly cyclohexylene dimethylene pthalate comma glycol modified everything petg does well pctg does better everywhere petg fails pctg is like mildly inconvenient this stuff takes an insane beating it gets water loged a third as quickly and it is one of the easiest filaments to print no warping minimal sagging and almost perfect layer adhesion for consistently strong prints in all directions pctg gets the top of s TI because it's as close as you can get to a perfect filament really its only downsides are supports are hard to remove it's expensive and it's really hard to find which is probably what makes it expensive I truly cannot comprehend why the market hasn't caught up yet I suspect it's only a matter of time that last letter the glycol makes the polymer more flexible and easy to print but if you want to play in hard mode hard as in challenging and as in stiff you can leave the plasticizer out the result is pet also called bpet for bottle grade and HTP for high temperature this filament prints at 275° minimum ideally over 300 compared to petg pet is stiffer tougher shinier and absolutely devastating to be glass and pei and of course crazy resistant ey temperatures it's basically super petg it shares PG's problems with overhangs warping and humidity except they're even worse that said it's easier and cheaper to print pet than other high-powered engineering filaments like nylon and polycarbonate so I'm going to put pet and high be tier it's got power but you will suffer for it remember how carbon fiber made PG better well CF pet is way way way better it's almost as easy to print as entry-level petg and it's extremely stiff I use this for the arm on my heads up display to lock the Optics in place it won't Flex so you know it doesn't wobble there aren't very many suppliers for this stuff so spools like this one from bamboo lab tend to get pretty pricey still I think this filament deserves the a tier simply by being one of the easiest to use high performance po poers if your printer has an airtight enclosure and the nozzle can get hellaciously hot you owe it to yourself to try this material our next filament is not pla it's not petg but it prints like the former works like the ladder and packs a secret power of its own this is po vinyl butyrate PVB is weaker than PG on paper but since it's slightly more flexible I found it performs equally well in real life PVB A Lot Like Yours Truly reveals its true colors when exposed to alcohol isopropanol melts the layers together fuses the surface into a slick liquid Sheen but that hoist Bard has two edges when you swab your plate with alcohol it doesn't disappear it stays in the air so now my entire spool of PVB is fused together PVB gets the PVB tier luckily Vapor smoothing isn't unique to PVB you can also do it with abs acrylo nitr butro styrene is ubiquitous and consumer products like toys gadgets and until very recently 3D printing you can run this stuff amazingly fast and since it dissolves in acetone you can solvent weld it and use a vapor chamber to get a seamless surface ABS is cheap it withstands some pretty impressive temperatures and a lot of punishment it is crazy tough but EBS has two massive weaknesses and if you're still listening you probably already know them I'll make it quick it warps like crazy and it RS you don't truly need an enclosure to print ABS it's a bit overblown but you really want one ABS is at its best for outdoor prints doesn't get too brittle in Winter it doesn't turn to taffy in the summer and while it's not totally resistant to the sun's ultraviolet rays it can tank them for most of a decade but I'm putting abs and SE here because if you want these properties you actually have a better option in the form of Asa acrylo nitr styrene acrylate is a chemical cousin of ABS but its upsides are upper and its caveats just less concave ASA withstands heat all the way to the boiling point and can survive in definitely in direct sunlight it's also just as tough as abs and has a really handsome matte surface molten ASA is also one of the least viscous of all the polymers so if you're trying to set speedboat records this is the filament of Champions it's not easy to print per se but it does warp a lot less it still off gases just as much filthy a flua so you know wear a snorkel it's a bit of a to print but if your project needs to take a beating it's a really good choice I'll put ASA in a tier high impact poly styrene is similar to ABS but a bit softer more waxy and slightly flexible as name implies hips can take some punishment and combined with its low density it works great in wearable devices and props you'll usually find the stuff sold as a support material for ASA or ABS the solvent lemoning lemons will attack hips but won't affect other styring still hips is a useful material in its own right so I'm going to put it in B tier we're now entering the pain in the ass engineering polymer territory these are tricky to print and they need fancy printers but if you're a working Pro or serious nerd sooner or later you're going to need their strength let's start with the quintessential engineering filament nylon or polyamide this actually refers to a whole family of plastics and the most popular for printing are pa6 and pa2 we'll start with the former which is the more popular of the two by a huge margin pa6 nylon deserves its role as the go-to heavy duty filament it's exceptional strength superpowered layer bonds and high flexibility make pa6 prints nigh Immortal this stuff stays stable at a higher heat than even abs and since it's so slippery nylon mechanisms will run smoother for longer that said it's such an astronomical pain in the as to print high-end machines are literally designed around its problems nylon is so aggressively hygroscopic a reel can get completely water logged before a print can even finish a dehydrator and a heated dry box are absolutely mandatory just don't get carried away if you dry nylon too much it'll get brittle and spontaneously crumble also nylon warps light crazy a sealed enclosure can help but you really want an actively heated chamber even if the first layer stays on the plate nylon warps with such force it can rip the plate right off the bed because your prints will only be as good as your printer and your patience pa6 nylon goes in B tier that sometimes you really need to crank the heat you want pa12 nylon this stuff prints way hotter usually around 300 celus and since it warps even harder than pa6 a hot box is an absolute requirement pa12 is stiffer than pa6 so it's better for cars RC vehicles machine tools and other heavyduty but Precision jobs remember rigid means brittle so as durable as pa12 is it's still easier to break than pa6 I'm going to put pa12 in B tier it's got advantages over pa6 but since it's more expensive and harder to print you're usually better off with its less carbonated cousin carbon fiber can seriously improve nylon's performance but unless you're using a real Fancy Pants printer the difference just is not there carbon fiber nylon usually called pacf is stiffer than vanilla and warps a lot less but even 80% less warping is a Sho to warping you also sacrifice nylon's low friction and you need an insanely powerful Hoten to preserve those high-powered layer bonds this Pantheon hs3 is so overbuilt specifically because it's meant to print CF nylon at high speed you need a powerful Drive motor to force the filament in fire breathing hot end to get it out and a powerful Gantry just to whip all that around I'm going to put PA 6 CF in B tier and pa12 CF in C tier that said if you want a seriously strong far friendlier filament especially if you have an expense account you want PF glassfille nylon is one of the modern world's most important materials from chainsaws to handguns a huge variety of heavy duty gizmos are made practical and inexpensive by injection molding this exact same material compared to Pure nylon gfpa is massively stiffer tougher and more resistant to heat abrasion and impact the glass fibers reinforce nylon's strength and they cut warping to the point that this is actually a fairly easy filament to print glass fibers are extremely abrasive and they drive up the print temperature you really want a Tungsten Carbide or gemstone tip plus abrasion resistant Drive gears but with the right settings GF is a pleasure to print while being so durable it's a viable alternative to machined aluminum I'm going to put glass filled nylon in s tier this is high-end stuff that calls for high-end printer but if you need this level of high-end performance you can probably afford it let's get back to my comfort zone with nylon pet Alloys when you hear tough petg or low temperature nylon this is probably what you're in for these combos of polyamide and polyester are pitched as a step up from petg or a way to print nylon on a lower-end printer but while you get a bit of nylon strength you get a lot of its weaknesses petg and nylon both like to peel off the plate and by their powers combined your prints will become the tacos they always knew they were nylon polyester Blends belong in C tier cuz 99% of the time you're better off just picking a side next up PC not political correctness polycarbonate although if there is a politically correct filament I definitely want it for that every filament episode with bulletproof toughness and a glass-like Sheen this is literally bulletproof glass printed polycarbonate won't actually resist small arms but it is one of the toughest stiffest filaments and if you do break it it doesn't shatter like pla polycarbonate gulps up moisture almost as thirstily as nylon and is one of the slowest printing filaments it also prints hotter than 300 Celsius but once it sets you have to heat the model to almost 150° before it starts to soften I'm going to put polycarbonate in B tier it is the beefiest standard filament but those numbers can be real Overkill it's just too much work for what's usually a gratuitous upgrade adding carbon fiber to polycarbon it amps up that stiffness to record setting levels so you can make prints that barely Flex even when they're loaded with hundreds of kilos but unless your printer feeds the Reel directly into the extruder cfpc's stiffness and roughness can easily overload a drive motor and stall out the entire system this stuff isn't as useful in general as other composits or even polyc carbonet but I'm still going to put it in a tier extreme stiffness is just a really useful property and in your mother's opinion feels incredibly good also like your mom cfpc is surprisingly cheap this reel of prry line super hard PC is barely 60 bucks kilo on Amazon polycarbonate is also crystal clear in fact the only thermoplastic with better Optics is our next filament pmma polymethyl methacrylate also known as acrylic plexiglass perspex loose site and like a thousand other brand names is almost always sold by the sheet but even in filament form pma's Clarity is truly incomparable you can even buff it to a frosted or polished surface since it has great resistance CUV acrylic can even shine in direct sunlight unfortunately pmma sucks as a filament it has terrible bed adhesion crappy layer adhesion and high thermal expansion so prints are likely to fail during or even after the printing process it's also extremely brittle and absorbs water super aggressively while taking a very long time to dehydrate it's a terrible filament but it looks really really gorgeous it's not that expensive and compared to other outdoor filaments is not actually that demanding I'm going to put pmma in C tier C for Clear every non-tr parent pmma gets an F because I truly do not know why these exist our next one is a sneak peek from the upcoming exotic filaments episode PC PBT an alloy of polycarbonate the same easy to print biopolymer that puts a plus in roughly a third of pla with a print temperature of only 260 C Superior surface quality and super low warping this isn't just the easiest polycarbonate I've ever used is one of the easiest filaments it even opens up an entire new class of projects PBT classifies the polycarbonate but it preserves its strength and shatter resistance far below the freezing point that makes PC PBT one of very few filaments that won't get brittle in the cold its durability ease of printing and low price put PC PBT in a tier a for Arctic but when it comes to special properties the next one Takes the Cake this stuff lets you squirt out half mm layers with a 1.6 mm nozzle at only 33° C that can slash print Times by 2/3 and it doesn't need cooling fans and enclosure or even a heated bed this material is 100% plant-based so biodegradable you can literally eat your print chocolate is the only printable and edible thermoplastic currently on the market and I'd like to put it in C tier because chocolate starts with a C unfortunately uh it's disqualified it comes in Candlelight cocoa cores and this is a filament tier list I guess I'll just have to put this Banshee somewhere else speaking of gimmicks let's loosen up with some funky flexibles the difficulty of printing a flexible filament and its practicality for projects depends on your printer in other words take these ratings with a grain of salt let's start with a flexible filament most people think about when they think about flexible filament TPU thermoplastic polyurethane is tough it's cheap and you can get it in countless colors and hardnesses the stuff also permanently bonds to most build surfaces so use a glue stick or face its wrath all TPU absorbs water like crazy and it only prints properly when it's dry so it dehyd hydrator and possibly a dry box are mandatory it is otherwise really easy to print and you can actually use supports 99d TPU is harder than a skateboard wheel it's basically rigid why would you want an inflexible flexible filament well TPU actually has two more superpowers perfect layer adhesion and outright immunity to shattering so this gimmick material is basically indestructible TPU is the definitive choice for combat robots tactical gear and similar Rough and Tumble full contact situations that would push other materials past the breaking point the sheer durability and versatility of hydrometer TPU and how little money and skill you need to get it sends it directly to S tier add durometer isn't soft per se but it's also not stiff it's as rigid as the sole of a running shoe and a good balance for things like bumpers hinges and semi-legal Nerf melee weapons it's also just as easy to print as long as you don't try to make anything tall and thin I'm going to give semiflexible TPU a b since it's trickier to print and it's too stiff for many projects but too Supple for others 88 durometer TPU is about the softest you can get this is unambiguously a floppy flexible filament this has a nasty habit of tying itself around your drive gear so you have to maintain constant low speed and keep an eye on the printer I don't really like this stuff it seems like the obvious choice for wearables but since TPU doesn't breathe it instantly gets really sweaty and uncomfortable I'm going to put low durometer TPU and C tier technically TPU is a type of ther plastic elastomer but when people see tpe filament they're usually referring to a material that's both flexible and stretchy this means your extruders Drive gears can squash tpe filament flat you have to turn up your Extrusion multiplier but it's really hard to predict how much it also doesn't help the tpe pours out of the nozzle like a runny fluid so prints in this material usually end up looking more like this F in chat tpe in F if you still want that stretch re joy for technology has marched on this is styrene ethylene butterine styrene a form of tpe enhanced with the same chemical that makes ABS perform really well and also smell really bad sebs inherits the weaknesses of both tpe and abs it's extremely hygroscopic and it releases stinky styrene fumes it also softens at a very low temperature so be careful when you dehydrate it or you might ruin the spool sebs print smoothly and consistently but because different extruders compress the filament in different ways you have to dial it in by hand once per printer but take one look at this print and you will know sebs is absolutely worth the effort the fact that a filment can be this flexible stretchy and smooth to print is truly astounding it's not a stretch to put sebs high at top the a tier this is all getting to positive let's regenerate our cynicism with the uniquely obnoxious polypropylene PP isn't just a funny pair of letters it can bend without taking damage it's extremely rugged and it's phenomenal layer Ian in tensile strength make even single wall vas prints effectively Invincible it's also the lowest density filament so prints feel feather light and you get like 30% more filament per kilo but polypropylene does not appreciate being printed first PP has some of the worst bed adhesion then polypropylene is more curly than a three stouge and the warping actually gets worse when it cools light CPU PP has perfect layer adhesion but it's so much tougher it makes supports impossible to remove at 40D durometer this PP is far softer than any TPU so you can't make the most of its strength I'm sticking my PP in F tier that said polypropene composits are spiffy glass fill PP is a standard material for industrial Machinery so unlike other polymers glass is more common than carbon this stuff is even more difficult to print than regular it peels off the bed easier it curls more aggressively and demands a direct drive extruder hardened nozzle and an enclosure but the payoff is bananas gfpp is one of the toughest most durable all-weather filaments you can run on a mid-range printer it's also unnervingly lightweight and you get a ton of filament per spool I'll put gfpp in B tier it is unbelievably obnoxious but also unbelievably tough all ifin block co- polymers are fairly new arrival to hobbyist Printing and they promise to fuse pp's toughness and PG's versatility OBC is semiflexible it warps a lot less and it can use supports but since it is still a poly Olive like polypropylene getting and keeping it on the bed is nearly impossible I'm going to put OBC in CS tier its rigidity and stability do make it more useful than the classic PP but it's way more expensive and can really only be printed on a purpose-made build surface I haven't found a glass fied OBC but I would love to try it highdensity polyethylene is one of the most popular Plastics most bottles jugs and buckets are made of this stuff and it is the most recycled polymer by far this is the worst filament in every way a filament can suck HDPE sets a new low it is impossible to overstate how desperately hdp wants to warp pry itself off the bed split layer lines and generally exact its Vengeance for the crime of trying to print with it this gets the fiest F hdp's only role is purging the extruder when you switch between high and low temperature filaments hdp's bed adhesion is one of the worst but if you want the absolute worst you want polyoxymethylene AKA acetyl or delin I don't know why you would actually want that but here you go every CNC user is familiar with palm it's this cheap usually icy white resin that's super stiff super easy to machine and has a remarkably low coefficient of friction Palm has literally zero bed adhesion you have to glue a wooden board or a sheet of rough paper to your bed and lay down the first layer so aggressively it embeds itself into the fibers like it needs a mechanical connection to stay on the bed Palms layers really want to split apart so you have to heat the enclosure and go as slow as possible there are two more giant problems with palm anything it can do nylon can do cheaper and easier second if Palm gets a little bit too hot it degrades into the corpse preserving cancer-causing toxin they call fahid the name polyoxymethylene is actually a euphemism because polyer Malahide sounds too scary for that reason alone I'm going to put p in F tier f for f Malahide but it's not the most toxic filament not even close poly vadine fluoride AKA Kar is a chemical cousin of Teflon pvdf filament is as easy to print as petg but it's way tougher it's way more durable and it boasts extreme resistance to heat friction and abrasion it's also absolutely hydrophobic so it never needs to be dehydrated PDF's headline feature is its chemical resistance this is immune to almost every solvent and reagent known to science including seriously scary stuff like halogenated hydrocarbons and inorganic acids I don't know what the those are if there's a chemist watching that chemist should really leave a comment pbdf is pretty expensive but other than that it's in all respects the perfect filament however if your hot end gets a few dozen degrees too spicy pvdf decomposes into a cornicopia of the world's most terrifying chemicals carbon monoxide hydrogen cyanide and hydrocloric acid are only a few ingredients in the toxic death Cloud that will form around your extruder if pbdf couldn't decompose into acid that that passes through your skin to dissolve your bones it would get a double s+ rank of its very own but it does so it goes in F second best won't dissolve your bones so suppose you prefer your bones undissolved but you still want to dip your print in boiling Aqua Regio while hitting it with a sledgehammer I won't Kink shame what you want is a super polymer and we'll start with the best known and best performing of the bunch Peak polyether ether Ketone has mechanical thermal and chemical properties so far beyond those of any conventional plastic it's more of an alternative to Steel it's nearly twice as tough as the toughest polycarbonate it's so rugged it's used in like missiles literally rocket science even if you blast this with a torch Point Blank it'll extinguish itself as it breaks down into non-toxic byproducts it resists chemicals that are so aggressive a villain would slowly lower James Bond into a vat of them Peak is the single strongest stiffest toughest printable plastic and there's nothing out there that even comes close you could say it gives you Peak Performance br's face Palms so hard you probably hear it there are a few caveats teeny weeny little caveats Peak cost $700 a kilo uh also it prints 400° C that's about 100° hotter than a soldering iron that is hot enough to AAL steel I.E you UNH hardens your nozzle it also needs a 140° chamber which are conditions so brutal half that heat would destroy all the bearings and fans in an ordinary printer Peak Hoover up water like I don't have a really good uh really good metaphor there you even need a special bed adhesive because at 145 Celsius the plate will cook everything else after all that Peak warps curls falls off the plate and is generally a bastard to print I'm going to put Peak and C tier because even though it's the best at pretty much everything it's so gratuitously off the charts you don't really have a reason to pay that much money and deal with all that if you can seed on one or more of those stats another Super polymer will give you a much bigger bang for your buck Peak example peak's little sister Peck pick polyether Ketone Ketone is the same chemical building blocks as Peak just in different proportions its mechanical properties are all worse but compared to regular filaments still off the charts PEC like Peak demands a lot of your printer but once you pass the gear check this is one of the easiest polymers to print full stop my tool changer doesn't have a heated chamber but I still managed to nail this beautiful Beni on the first try I think peek deserves the a tier even though Peak beats it on paper a PEC print is almost as strong and it's far more likely to succeed but if you're in this for the chemical resistance you can get literally the best and save a fortune with PPS when it comes to strength polyphenylene sulfide barely meets or beats polycarbonate but when chemicals are involved PPS is the Undisputed champ to the best of our knowledge there is nothing on the planet capable of dissolving or reacting with this material material below 200 Celsius at 200 bucks a kilo the stuff is expensive but still Within Reach of hobbyist and its print parameters 325° nozzle 140° plate are also practical for a dieh hard nerd I'm going to put PPS in C tier if you're working with boiling beers of costic chemicals it's a good thing it costs less cuz you'll need to save a few bucks for life insurance PSU poly sulphone not power supply unit is the weakest super polymer with mechanical properties about the same as PA 6 nylon but psu's glass transition temperature is an astronomical 187° C and it keeps its strength almost the whole way there you can literally print a nozzle out of PSU and use it to print pla it also shrugs off water radiation and chemicals and when you combine that with the heat resistance you can sterilize PSU as if it were surgical steel I'm going to put PSU high in the beter nylon is almost always going to be a better choice but PSU opens all kinds of New Frontiers and citizens science somewhere between Peak and PSU sit polyether sulphone and polyphenol sulphone PES and ppsu are exceptionally rugged they can hold their shape over 200° and they stand up to fire chemicals radiation look I don't even know why I'm talking about them like you people are not seriously deciding between Peak ppsu and PSU I'm just going to throw these at the tier list and let God rank them you can actually get most super polymers in carbon or glass filed flavors since these polymers are already so stiff the the additive mainly reduces warping and makes your prints look less like solidified urine very few printers can actually feed such a stiff rough filament and nozzles that can resist both extreme abrasion and extreme temperatures are crazy expensive this cfp Beni is standing in for all super polymer composits and I'm going to put it in C here super polymers may be the Dark Souls of filaments but our final three are the dwarf fortresses of filaments you know what's really weird you probably already own them meat poly Eide or Pei that's right the tough heat proof surface coating Every Spring Steel bed gets its time to shine on the other side of the nozzle Pei AKA ULM is sold in two grades 1010 and 9085 there's no reason to use 9085 so I'm just going to put it straight in F tier if you're going to spend 400 bucks on a single reel of filament you deserve the good stuff ultim 1010's Flex ril strength is the second stiffest after Peak its tensile strength makes it the second strongest after Peak its glass transition temperature is 2 17 celsi making it the second most heat proof after our next one ULM might not set records but it is incredibly solid at literally everything you can blast it with electricity hose it with chemicals nuke it with radiation emulate it with a torch and run it over with a truck simultaneously and it'll fight you with every molecule and keep its strength to The Bitter End but the gigachad of filaments demands the Giga chat of printers 425° hot end 60° bed just dehydrating this needs a 150° convection oven needless to say you can't print it on a Pei coded build plate at least not twice once you've checked these Bonkers boxes ULM is actually really friendly to print it's low coefficient of thermal expansion reduces curling and allows this to capture tighter Dimensions than most super polymers ultime 985 is everything you want a super polymer serious strength stability and safety while still staying straightforward to success y squirt in spite of the setup this stuff's not suitable for S tier its print parameters are just too ridiculous still I'm going to put ULM 985 in a tier the highest of all the super polymers our final filament today does not have a boat because I don't have anything even close to being able to print this this is thermoplastic polyamide AKA TPI AKA capton that's right the super strong yellow tape that makes spy satellites bulletproof and helps the space shuttle Survivor entry is a filament the glass transition temperature of nearly 250 C TPI is the most heat proof filament by a landslide and even though its mechanical properties are about 25% lower than those of peak TPI pulls further and further ahead as you crank up the heat it doesn't even start weakening till it breaks 170 C but printing TPI is like impossible 450° nozzle 220° plate 240° chamber that's 460 f it is 30% too hot to bake cookies in there I'm going to put TPI in F tier because any printer capable of running this effectively is going to be so expensive you'd probably save money by just buying a whole machine shop and hiring a machinist to run it and that is my tier list of the 40s something filaments every maker should know about have I convinced you to try any of these filaments for the first time let me know in the comments do you disagree with any of my opinions type it into a notepad and unplug your computer these filaments were neither easy nor cheap to collect and holy hell you should see the wacky sh coming in the next few episodes I'd like to thank my patrons for making episodes like this possible I going to reward supporters with an exclusive mini video where I name all the filaments I currently own we're also doing monthly Q&A streams behind the scenes mini docks and hangouts in the secret lab channel of our Discord support me at patreon.com Freedman and let the bonus content flow like a river a river of content a stream if you will each video I thank three 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failure iron rain moonkin powerful CCH Clayton Easley protagonist Mike Kelly socks MCG Circle zero I think I changed my name to Lost dryer socks there are some who call me Tim a zundo wielder vant heater of shrink you're gay Bob doton yes probably not three raccoons in a trench coat Spire varka vwat zap Olive Robbins Dennis campen and Steve y he actually joined a patreon while I was writing this part thanks for watching and I'll see you in the future

Channel: Zack Freedman

Views: 180,603

Keywords: DIY, zack friedman, zach friedman, zach freedman, voidstar lab, voidstar labs, 3d printing, 3d printed projects, diy projects, every filament, every single filament, best filament, worst filament, which 3d filament

Id: weeG9yOp3i4

Length: 44min 34sec (2674 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2024