Why this 3D Printing TPU Filament is full of glass balls.

I thought that in this video it was time for some reflection reflection get it never [Music] mind [Music] this episode is sponsored by PCB way more about that later on what you're looking at is reflect Olay by karthy which has been around for years there's no and Clause that comes after that statement it has literally been around for years that's it I guess the reason it doesn't get much coverage is because it's expensive and nobody's heard of it or knows what it is and I'm not even sure if they still actually make it anyway for an abundance of clarity before you head to the comments section this is not an ad for reflect delay nor do I even know where you would buy it at this moment in time nor do I even care if you like it or not this is another episode in my series of unusual filaments and that's the point of this series to Deep dive into unusual filaments and see what they are and why so yeah feel free to head down to the comments anyway and say it's not for me but thanks is this worth buying no it's probably not worth buying is this video worth watching I think so because we're going to learn things there's some really cool stuff so I think we have an understanding let's [Music] go so what is reflect delay the answer is a journey because of course it's a journey it's always a journey so let's go on that Journey the basic premise is that if you shine a light on it it reflects now lots of things do this basically anything shiny but this stuff does it in a particular way it's called retro reflection retrolective materials reflect a fair proportion of the light you shine at them back out at approximately the same angle that you shine it in at in theory there's a few kinds of retro reflectors or I should say a few ways of doing it the common bicycle is a huge source of retro reflectors because bicycles are a generally pretty passive thing so you don't want to really power all the things on a bicycle so they need to be seen out on the road but not through their own light emission so it's kind of a perfect application for anything that bounces light back so that the bicycle can be seen and that's probably why you see bicycles almost entirely covered with reflective things this thing is probably what you think when you think about a retro reflector these are intentionally made geometric structures painted silver and through the magic of science they have an angle of reflection approximately the same as the angle of incidence in most cases they bounce the light inside and it comes out the opposite way I always found them fascinating as a child maybe that's just me but they used to fall out of my breakfast cereal if you're old enough you'll you'll know what that means these are cool but I doubt if there's a billion of these things in reflector because that would be some epic feat of miniaturization and they're clearly doing something else and they are doing something else although I didn't expect to see quite what I saw when I zoomed in on reflect toay so let's do that I don't know at what point I became the macro 3D printing Channel but I guess it's probably just because I'm quite good at it I don't really want to blow my own trumpet but I've seen other content creators that apparently they don't know that the camera unlocks from the tripod anyway let's go to the microscope interestingly we start to really see what we're looking at here because for the first time we could see that these definitely look like balls this is not really good enough though I don't Reg reget buying this microscope but it's it's nowhere near the 600 times magnification or whatever it claimed to be it's fine I mean it's it's convenient but we can get a lot closer just with um some basic camera setup I do explain all my macro stuff on on Patron so if you're a patron subscriber go go and have a look because I've actually pretty much listed all the equipment I use and and why I use it and what it does anyway uh we are definitely staring at balls the surprising thing is how many balls though I feel like there's more balls in here than there is thermoplastic which is interesting cuz you wouldn't think that that would be able to print I suppose it's probably about 50/50 I I mean how would you how would you guess but you have to start to wonder how this will print with this amount of whatever in it but what is the whatever I think it's time for another diversion that's a road joke because Road paint is typically a thermoplastic so of course you're thinking what does Road paint look like close up I thought that as well so I went and had a look those familiar looking beads are documented on the internet though so we can use the answer to what's in Road paint to figure out what's in reflector lay in case you hadn't already figured it out and confirm that it is some kind of glass glass beads are functional as retro reflectors because they also reflect internally give or take or that's what Wikipedia says I'm not sure I'm convinced by that anyway they're probably cheap and easy to make because as I understand it you just kind of extrude them from the the glass from a high press nozzle and it sort of makes these balls I read about it I don't know any more than that so you can throw them into just about anything including road paint and reflective filament and it has the desired effect and yes we can go closer at this point it might seem just like eye candy for the sake of it because we've answered the question as to what's in the filament now it does look cool but there's also something here that we will find useful in a moment so hold that thought so what about printing it I I didn't actually promise that I said let's look at it I never said let's print it so amusing as it might be to not print it I guess we probably should in terms of safety data it's basically TPU with glass balls in it by the look of it so the main thing is not to burn it or heat it over 260c yes if you read safety data sheets I know that people constantly think that I shouldn't read safety data because who wants to you know read safety data but yeah it does tell you that TPU becomes literally cyanide if you burn it so for the test I'm going to use the new creality flagship printer which you might or might not recognize here this thing is quite a big deal actually it is the Ender 3 V3 not notably any of the other Ender 3 v3s you might have seen this one has no letters after it this is the final but also the OG G Ender 3v3 I know anyway I'm going to throw this TPU at the Ender 3v3 and given the fact that it appears to be made of half TPU half balls you would expect that that would be a quick way to block a nozzle wouldn't you we'll see that was actually quite impressive that was the standard TPU settings which are extraordinarily fast I'll put them on screen now I didn't think that would work at all I do feel like TPU printing these days is just so much easier because extruder hotend combos are just way way better designed in terms of constraining the filament but there is a but we'll get to it after the sponsor section so I got these back the other day if you're a subscriber to the channel and you view the nozzl vid you'll know exactly what these are if not you probably missed out on the best video I've made so far on the entire channel so you need to watch it after this anyway this PCB has been made and assembled by PCB way who are the sponsor of this video I made the PCB in Fusion 360 and I speced the components using just the farell website here in the UK and by supplying the necessary files to PCB way with those files they actually built the whole thing for me including soldering the components on which is good because I'm really not good at soldering surface mounted components like these because they they're actually really tiny so this will be used in the next nozzle video part two which is coming next I think after this and it's going to be huge in every sense of the word no pressure but yeah it's going to be it's going to be a really interesting video trust me I've also got a bunch of unpopulated boards in case I'm brave enough to try and soer them myself I don't I don't see that happening but I can show you how cool the black matte silk screen is I did mention why I was doing that in the nozzle video this is intentional to try and cut down on reflections back into the lens anyway go check out PCB way and make your own PCB idea into a reality following the links Below in the description where there's also a new customer offer for first orders thank you PCB way for sponsoring this video so we were talking about a butt with respect to printing reflector lay the defaults for TPU and this will apply to any printer seem to cause a horrendous amount of underere Extrusion and this is something I see a lot where people don't realize that TPU isn't supposed to look like this TPU should look smooth and uniform just like any other filament like PLA and if it's coming out fluffy like this unless it's expanding foam TPU which is a different product it might appear like the print has come out successfully but you're actually underextruding I think a good part of why this is happening is something that I noticed when I was handling the filament it's able to be fairly easily stretched Beyond its elastic limit and that's not great for printing I did also in later tests have a couple of blockages not not actual nozzle blockages it's more where the extruder deforms the incoming filament as we've just said and it it can't recover because it doesn't go back to its original shape so it just gets stuck there and it's unable to push it any further forward the solution to this was to just generally print slower and that does seem to solve it and at the same time it's solving the undere Extrusion problem maybe they were one and the same but yeah it's trickier to deal with the most other TPU filaments because of this problem and it sort of behaves in terms of printing a bit more like a 70a TPU than a 95a I'm talking about Shore hardness if you don't know what that is I have made a video on that in the past and I'll try and Link that in the description below as well but speaking of sh hardness we should probably measure [Music] it [Music] of course there's also the problem that a filament that's essentially half glass balls and half thermoplastic is also going to be really weak after [Music] [Music] printing [Music] it's generally behaving as if there's sand mixed in with the filament which I suppose is pretty close to the truth and this probably accounts for the matte finish you get when you print it as well anyway one of the key questions I have is whether the printed surface looks anything like the filament surface under magnification because you might have noticed something when we were looking at the macro images before if you look at the edge of the filament you can see that there's material over much of the balls but I intentionally spliced it to expose the internal surface of the filament and you can see that this doesn't cut through the glass beads but it exposes them quite cleanly instead in theory this means that a cut surface of filament will reflect light better than a plain extruded one because making the filament is much like printing it so you'd expect the same but let's actually see you can't really say that the macro stuff was just useless now really can you because it's showing us things like [Music] this so in terms of just generally printing it with the right speeds I.E slow surprisingly it doesn't tend to block the nozzle at least on the Ender 3v3 here I think this is probably probably because the beads are very tiny and they're also round and smooth unlike say glitter so any potential to block is probably just too low friction and I don't think they tend to kind of gather together in the same way that bits of glitter can and again with macro shots and this is not just macro this is macro slowed down this is 240 FPS slowed down to 25 so that's about nine times slower than reality you can see that the balls are really small compared to the size of the nozzle orifice this also looks really cool especially if you shine a directional light source at [Music] it and on that note in terms of how reflective the finished piece is well retro reflective stuff picks up low light from a larger distance so if you just blast studio lights at it like like I can he any nominally reflective surface like a shiny silver surface or something light it will probably look brighter than the Retro reflective surface to really test it you need to be using it in the way it's intended which is well further away and with less available light and with very directional light there is a good reason why Road paint and road signs and reflective jackets and tape and stuff all use this technology even though both of them could just use bright white pigment so thinking about what you could use this stuff for well more than you would think there it's the basic printing something to go on a kid's school bag there's bike spoke reflectors as the data sheet says you can even sew it to clothes but there's more than that if you think about it a lot of sensor applications exist that need to specifically reflect light back to a source so you could create custom sensor reflectors with reflector lay to as I said at the start of the video I don't know what the situation is for these filaments by kaiy or indeed who they are I feel like half the stock on sale out there is remaining stuff possibly even from 2018 and I feel like this isn't being manufactured anymore but that's literally just a guess as there's no information about it at all it could still be being made for all I know I suppose that also means that if you're interested in this filament or any of the other Kai party stuff because there's all sorts of different filaments that um they did or do then you should probably get a hold of it if you can because you might not be able to when you when you want to if that makes sense ultimately though as I said at the at the start of this video is this stuff worth buying or using probably not for most people if you want your reflective stuff on your whatevers then you can just as easily bite a sheet of it or tape and you can cut it out and incorporate it into your prints and it will likely work better because of the challenges we talked about with the filament covering the beads and of course not to forget the other filaments are reflective as well like metallic silk filament for a large amount of applications where you just need reflectivity closeup those will probably work better anyway though I did enjoy looking at it closeup and seeing what makes it work and I hope that you did also so I don't think this was a waste of time even though I'm sure some of you will comment saying it was a waste of time sorry if you like these weird filament video deep Dives then make sure you mention that in the comments so that I know to make more of these kind of videos make sure you like And subscribe if you haven't already and I will see you next time thank you for [Music] watching a

Channel: Lost In Tech

Views: 41,519

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Id: lLOR4nwe80Y

Length: 17min 33sec (1053 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024