This is the biggest 3D printing material comparison I’ve done so far, but let’s start from the beginning. So, we’re probably all going through quite a rough time at the moment. Many of us are afraid of getting sick and I gotta be honest I’m also a bit of a germophobe myself. During the last days and weeks there have been popping up quite a lot of designs of tools that try to, for example help us open things like doors without directly touching them. There is Materialise’ hands free door opener or a ton of different safe door opening hooks and plenty of other stuff around. Also, there is currently a huge initiative around 3D printed face shields being established. Even though I highly appreciate these efforts, I’ve been asking myself if 3D printing is the right technology for these applications. If you don’t have single use items you might need to consider to disinfect them in some way in regular intervals, because people are for example encouraged to sneeze into their elbows but then use the same part of their arm with the door opener. Even though the door opening hooks are designed for minimum surface contact you still touch the handle then put it into your trouser pockets and finally you use it on the next door, theoretically transmitting germs. So wiping these parts with common disinfectants or even submerging them is something that came up in my head. But how are our 3D printed materials affected by that? Are they getting weaker or even brittle over time? I don’t know so that’s why I 3D printed samples in probably the 10 most common materials, submerged them for 48h in 70% isopropyl alcohol, checked their dimensions and weight and most importantly tested the change in their strength. Just as a disclaimer, I can’t say anything about the effectiveness of this or other disinfecting methods, I’ll only try to find out – if you’re using this method, will it affect you part integrity. With their layer lines, pores and cracks, FDM 3D printed parts are very hard to clean so consider if it’s safe what you’re doing!

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Almost one and a half years ago I released my most popular video to date in which I recycled failed 3D prints into new filament using the Filastruder. One of the steps in this process is chopping down the material that you want to use. I tried a blender and a modified paper shredder in the past, which worked for small parts and supports, but things even only like a 3D Benchy were just a no-go. The paper shredder was overwhelmed with everything bigger than support structure and the bender, either wasn’t able to chop down material or it pulverized it. Having a consistent particle size for the subsequent processes is very important and I wasn’t able to achieve that so far. I also recently received a direct pellet extruder made by Mahor that I want to feed with recycled plastics and which is very picky with the particles you feed it. Since there is quite a lot of interest in that field in general, I thought I finally get back at it and in order to do it properly and have the possibility to also shred things like PET bottles, I bought myself a beefy plastics shredder. Since I’m lacking space, I tired to make it hand powered, which was a bit of a challenge.

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The hotends of common 3D printers look pretty much the same and mostly use these small nozzles where the material is melted. I think everyone has already heard that for printing faster and especially with bigger nozzles a so called volcano hotend might be necessary. They use longer nozzles and give the filament more time to properly heat and melt before the plastic leaves the nozzle. The material throughput is usually characterized by the flow rate so the amount of material that is pushed though the extruder per second. This property is linearly proportional to the printing speed, nozzle diameter and layer height and can be visualized for example in PrusaSlicer. If you’re printing with a standard 0.4mm nozzle, this value is usually single digit, if you’re not going crazy fast. Bigger nozzles and the often-resulting thicker layers though can drastically increase that value. The question now is, how you can find out what is still possible with your current setup and when it might be a good idea to upgrade to a volcano heater block. I’ve even seen these fancy nozzles that claim higher melting capability since the surface area is increased by its shape.

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A couple of months ago Colorfabb released two really interesting new Filaments that are called VarioShore TPU and LW or Lightweight PLA. The cool thing about those materials is that, on the roll, they look like any other regular filament but during printing you can adjust their density by changing the nozzle temperature. The heat causes the generation gas withing the filament that then foams up with microscopic bubbles. With the TPU you notice that it gets softer when printed at higher temperatures hence, varioshore TPU, the PLA really nicely foams up and gets that matt surface. If you’re hearing foaming now you might wonder why this is a good thing because we usually avoid that effect by drying our filaments. In this case though foaming is used in a way more controlled manner that causes the extruded filament to foam up very uniformly with tiny bubbles. This isn’t achieved with water, like it is the problem with bad filament but by adding a blowing agent. A blowing agent is a substance that creates a gas when heated and is therefore capable of creating a cellular structure in our polymer. This can even be baking soda or some other chemicals that are finely mixed into the material before the filament is extruded. You don’t end up with a foamy filament during extrusion because it’s extruded under the decomposition point but the higher temperatures in your nozzle later start the process.

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So many viewers are constantly asking what a good, entry level 3D printer is so I currently have the Ender 3 Pro and the Alfawise U30 Pro running side by side in a comparison test. This review will be released at some other point in the future but I thought I’d share with you how I was able to get rid of these blobs on the surface of the U30 Pro prints because the solution is, I think a bit out of the ordinary. You often see these printing artifacts at the location where the printing move of a perimeter ends and the build-up pressure in the extrusion system pushes more material out of the nozzle before that pressure is relieved by the retraction move. This is mostly fixed by coasting, wiping or higher retractions though in the case where I noticed it, it was on a vase where the wall was printed in a spiral so theoretically at a constant speed of the printhead without any retractions or similar. Upon closer inspection I noticed that in reality though the printhead stuttered from time to time where again, the built-up pressure in the bowden extrusion system lead to the blobs. But why?

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Even though you can nowadays get almost any thermoplastic as a 3D printing filament PLA, PETG and ABS are still the most common ones used. PLA is the most printed material due to being very easy to print without any significant smell but with the downside of being a bit brittle and thermally not very resistant. ABS is slowly replaced by a very similar material which is ASA, that performs almost the same, but with the added benefit of being UV resistant, having less warping tendency and lower odor. PETG has been on the uprise since a couple of years and is praised for having the ease of printing of PLA but being less brittle and thermally more resistant. But how do those materials really perform in a side by side comparison and is there “a” best material.

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Infill structure is the lattice material that is placed inside of your 3D prints so that you don’t have to print them 100% dense and therefore using a lot of material and time, where it’s often not needed. Infill comes in lots different varieties and I’ve tested many of them in the past already. There hasn’t been a lot of things going on over the recent years besides the current hype of gyroid infill which is a good choice for some applications but also not always.

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Almost a year ago I released a very popular video on threaded inserts for 3D prints on which I got a ton of suggestions and comments. One of them was that I used for my tests a type of threaded insert that I found on my local eBay which looks quite a bit different than the typical ones that you find on AliExpress or also on Amazon. Despite the different look, do they really perform differently and how easy are they to use? This is something I tried to find out for this video. Did you also already try one of these types of inserts then let us know your experience down in the comments! For the last test I also used M5 threaded inserts, whereas it seemed that most of you rather put M3 inserts in your 3D prints, so I purchased similar M3 threaded inserts as last time from the same eBay shop. I also purchased a set of these brass inserts on Amazon, that probably are rather used in injection molding. I also was bombarded with ads for these Ruthex threaded inserts on Instagram lately, that claim that they are especially designed for 3D printing, so I also bought a bag of those on Amazon. Not a sponsor by the way. They do look kind of nice though I think that rather than being specifically designed for 3D printing, those are just some proper heat seat inserts but we’ll find out how they perform! Links to all of those are down in the description by the way.

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I’m sure you’ve all heard or even experienced it already that using a larger nozzle in you 3D printer seems to result in quite a bit more sturdy parts. I also had the same impression in the past but always asked myself if my 3D prints really are stronger because the layers bond together better or if it’s just additional material you put down that reinforce the parts. So, first things first, let me know in the comments if you regularly use bigger nozzles and for which purpose. In order to provide you with a proper answer I’ve investigated exactly that. For this reason, I printed my test hook in it’s standing orientation with a standard 0.4mm and a 0.8mm nozzle on my Original Prusa i3 MK3S. I chose this combination of diameters because it gives me the possibility to keep the wall thickness the same for both parts. If you’ve also watched my previous video, you’ll know that by adjusting the extrusion width you can not only fuse the layers at least a little better but also extrude quite a bit wider than the bore diameter of the tip. This also posed the question if instead of switching nozzles you could also use this setting to get the same effect.

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