Deciding on a material for heavy duty industrial items

[Farr0wn3d]

Thats good to know, I would have just taken their claims at face value.

so you're suggesting I give epc a shot for my industrial projects?

[jimc]

Use perg whenever you can and for something that needs extra strength go with epc.

[Tim]

does the enclosure NEED to be actively heated, rather than passively by the bed and extruder? with an enclosure is there issues that arise when it comes to keeping the steppers cool?

Stepper motors won't have any problem running at that temperature. The electronics are probably not going to have issues, but they can be removed from inside the frame, so they don't need to share the enclosure.

The heated bed is good enough to heat itself, but not everything around it.

There are various threads on this forum discussing enclosures, both actively heated and not. I think the most popular is an easily-modifiable IKEA cabinet. Personally, I prefer to leave my printer open to the air and work with filaments that don't shrink much.

[insta]

Jim, which nylon have you worked with? I've heard 618 is less of a pain to work with and had much less shrinkage, thoughts?

618 is a miserable plastic that is best used for cold pulls and sitting on the shelf as a reminder to yourself to not use it. 645 on the other hand ... I use it exclusively (since William won't sell me more eSUN Nylon yet ) with an E3Dv6 on my dedicated Nylon machine. At 260C, 30mm/sec, 0.2mm layers it prints wonderfully. Once eSUN Nylon is available I'm probably not going to use anything else.

[jimc]

so insta, what did you think of the esun nylon? i have a prototype sample and even after putting it in the oven for 3 hrs to dry it out it still just came out as pure foam.

[insta]

so insta, what did you think of the esun nylon? i have a prototype sample and even after putting it in the oven for 3 hrs to dry it out it still just came out as pure foam.

Mine came out as pure foam too with no predrying, but it didn't matter for my part, and was ridiculously durable. The foam messed up the horizontal separation on the infill somewhat, but nothing else was affected.

It at least printed without jamming constantly like this 645 is.