TL;DR Spent way too much time printing a Marvin with Advanced PLA and didn’t even cook it in the oven to Test improved strength.If you find this helpful, and there’s a positive response, I’ll take the time to review the other 3 from this box, as well as the 4 from box #2 (ALGA, Hemp, PET+, and brassFill).Background: I haven’t seen anyone post about the Filaments that they received in their MakerBox subscriptions. So, since I had a bit of free time today, I figured I’d take a stab at it. I’ve never done a filament review before so I have no idea what YOU want to know about prior to purchasing filament. The downfall of this is the post end up being WAY long… Sorry!My SetupI will be testing the filament on an Enclosed Monoprice Maker Select V2 with the following main upgrades (only listed the important ones):z-axis bracesMicro Swiss All Metal Hotend with cooling BlockPrinted on a plain piece of Lowes glass with ABS Juice and used Simplify3D as a slicer. Printed .2mm layers at 24mm/s. Slower than I would have normally printed, but I didn’t want any issues with my printer to mask any issues with the filament.Filament Review:Anyway, now to start the Filament. In the first box send out, I received 4 coils of filaments.http://ift.tt/1roQeJg included:Advanced PLA – BlueBuzzed – BrownnGen – Silver MetallicCorkfill – BrownSince I haven’t done filament reviews before, i figured I’d start with what I thought to be the easiest filament: Advanced PLA.Here it is in all its glory:http://ift.tt/1XolKon 53g weight (I zeroed out the scale with the card on it, and the twist ties didn’t register even 1g so I didn’t worry about it):http://ift.tt/1roPwf9 rolled onto a Hatchbox spool I had laying around. All those years of running Fiber optics really paid off.http://ift.tt/1XomKZR much filament did you get? I didn’t want to risk getting any kinks, so I didn’t measure the filament distance. I did measure the internal circumference of the spool which was ~10″. There were 38 wraps around the bottom layer (I think), and ~33 on the top, totaling 71 times wrapped around. So 71 * ~10 inches = 710 inches / 12 inches = 59.1ft., so I’d say it’s more than likely 60ft or 18.2 meters.I measured the Filament 15 times while rolling it onto the spool, It was consistently 1.72mm at every measurement, no variations.Since I didn’t know where to start for printing, I figured I’d start with a temperature tower to figure out the best temperature to print it at. The label suggested 190-230, so I did a range of 230 (Bottom) to 180 (top) and used 50c for layer 1, 45c for layer 4+.http://ift.tt/1roP7t8 you may or may not be able to see, at 195c my extruder started skipping because the hot end was not hot enough to melt the PLA, so I canceled the print. As well, since the tower was printed in a 1 pass, I just grabbed and pulled, naturally breaking off the bottom… Woopsy! Anyway, so here are the results I got:http://ift.tt/1XolhTm well, I didn’t know what model to print, but since I saw a lot of people print out a Marvin, and it was small, I figured that’s what I’d use.http://ift.tt/1roQM1y Marvin came out really nice, bridging on the keychain part was flawless. No major artifacts or anything of the like. I’d say just as nice as any other PLA I’ve printed in (Primarily Hatchbox and Printerbot). The filament was very fragile. Bending it snapped very easily, which I think to be the only major downside.FeedbackOkay, now if you’re still with me to this point, I hope you found this all useful. If you would have liked to see additional information, please let me know and I will see what I can do about getting it to you. If you feel there’s a better way to test out the filaments, I’m all ears!I didn’t test cooking it in the oven, because I didn’t know how to test the “increased strength” after the fact. If you have any suggestions, I’m open to ideas!If there’s enough interest, I’ll take the time to test the other 3 along with the 4 filaments that were in box #2 (ALGA, Hemp, PET+, and brassFill).Lessons LearnedDon’t just pull off prints, use the removal tool.Need to find a better way to get the filament on and off a spool, or print out a spool that will work. Or finish off a roll of my eSun PETG which looks like it can be disassembled easily.Need to figure out a way to not spend 2 hours staring at printer printing. http://ift.tt/1OpoY8A
