reprapper petg and copper pla

[jimc]

well since esun doesnt have their petg opaque colors out yet and i quit buying abs all together i had to find another reasonably priced source. i decided to give reprapper a shot. they have a complete lineup of petg now at about the same price point as esun. the shipping will however put it over the top unless you buy a bunch at a time. i have another production run of gauge parts to do so i ordered 5 spools of black which made shipping only a few bucks for the whole order. their spools are a little nutty. very skinny and very large dia. hanging on the m2 they only clear the table top by about an inch. i think these might be this way to fit the gen 5 makerbots. not sure. as for the filament itself it nice and black. so far it has been fairly consistent diameter but i havent printed with this stuff anywhere near enough to give any solid review. so far i grabbed my esun petg profile and went right to town with it. i didnt change anything except for the filament dia. its printing clean and great. it does seem to be a little less stringy but i have found this to be less of a manufacturer thing and more of an opaque vs trans. as i print with this stuff more i will give more of a review.

since i was placing an order with reprapper i decided to give their copper pla a shot. this is their copper version of bronzefill i guess. they just released this stuff a week ago. it looks very interesting on the spool. the extrusion is a little scary but from what i can see it doesnt look like there are any extruder jamming bumps. this stuff is loaded with copper. ill print something with this stuff first chance i get and post it up

[Tim]

I've heard the copper fill is difficult to print with, or at least has a lot of extrusion problems. Don't know if those reports are from the production run for the copper filament or early versions, though. I'll be interested in hearing how it works for you.

[jimc]

here is a pic of the copper. you can see it has many little indents. it will be a little bit before i will have some free printer time to give this a go. there were a couple other people in a thread on another forum who got it as well. they havent mentioned difficulties......yet. time will tell i guess. maybe in a couple days when this spool of pet is empty ill give it a shot before i put on a new one.

as for the black reprapper petg, i have been printing now for about 16hrs straight and its working fantastic so far. one thing i have noticed with all brands of pet and that is i find very little variance from brand to brand as far as quality, properties, etc. they all seem to print close to the same, layer bond the same, same durability and it doesnt seem to matter the price of the stuff. i dont know if these filament companies have just worked out most of the bugs in their formulas and are just getting better at their job or i am just lucking out with buying filament. even with abs and pla it doesnt seem like finding a good roll of filament is as hard to do as it was a year ago.

[jsc]

Where's the pic, Jim?

[jimc]

haha oh crap...i forgot to attach it.

here you go.

IMG_3885.JPG (71.78 KiB) Viewed 14341 times

[insta]

That stuff looks terrible Hopefully it print better. That's about how good the HDPE I extruded looked and I wouldn't dream of selling it to someone.

[Tim]

You mention that the petg is black, but I've also seen it mentioned that nobody is selling opaque petg yet. . . does that mean that this is some kind of translucent black?

[jimc]

No tim there are tons of opaque petg's out there. The black is opaque for sure. The winbo, colorfabb, reprapper all have opaque.

[jimc]

ok well i tried the copper. it looks real nice for the 2-3 min i can print with it before it jams. i went to another forum thread where another person ordered it same time as me and they posted a pic of their spool and the extrusion looks perfect. nothing like mine at all. i guess i just got a bad one. waiting for the factory rep to get back with me to see what they want to do. im pretty sire they will send me another one. as for the petg..its great. no issues and im on my second spool now. printer is running 24/7 with this stuff. took me a couple shots to fine tune the settings for it. it seems to have a very narrow margin where it prints correctly. pet seems to be like that in general but this stuff seems a little narrower. prints great though at a slightly lower temp. extrusion is perfect on it. i am running at 235 instead of 245 with the others.

[jimc]

just wanted to say that reprapper is sending me a new spool of copper. that one was definitely not right.

2 rolls of black petg down as well without issue other than it being a real pia to tune settings for. so far its the toughest pet to get everything dialed in to. even printing perfectly it seems to collect on the nozzle during long prints. i got it down to a minimum now though. overall nice stuff just not for the beginner to 3d printing. the esun and pet+ is much easier.