Regular PLA is really easy to print and stronger than some might expect, though if a PLA part actually fails, it shatters quite violently. During the last years, many companies brought modified PLA filaments onto the market that claim to improve on the downsides, up to the point that some even call their modified PLA “Eco ABS”. Have you ever used a modified PLA and how was your experience? Let’s discuss down in the comments! There is not one PLA Plus or Tough PLA, so I can’t compare all of them, but I received a roll of Polymakers PolyLite PLA, which I call a regular “PLA” and a roll of their “PolyMax PLA” with is the modified version which I’ll use to represent PLA Plus. I thought this is a great opportunity to finally compare the two materials. The results will not match 100% with any other brand, but we’ll see really clear trends.

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So filaments made from PC /ABS, which is a blend of the two materials, is something that is quite common and helps combine different properties of those materials for specific needs. I have been using PC/ABS or other PC blends in the past, and even though they show good overall properties, layer adhesion in particular is still something they are usually not great at. When I first read the articles about this new type of filament, I wasn’t sure how this star-shaped pattern inside of the filament should help with mechanical properties. The paper they wrote about this method explained it better, though. The general idea is, that you heat treat your parts over the glass transition temperature but below the melting point, after printing which, supposedly fuses the layers together. Unfortunately, if you usually put prints into an oven and heat them over their glass transition temperature, which is important that the healing process works, they severely deform and make them not properly usable anymore. The idea behind the dual material filament is that the flow of the material through the 3D printer nozzle is laminar, so your print, that looks from the outside like ABS, is reinforced internally via a continuous polycarbonate core. This is important for the heat treatment step. ABS has a glass transition temperature of around 100°C and PC significantly higher at around 140°C. In order to minimize deformation, the heat treatment temperature with this material is above the glass transition temperature of ABS but below the one of PC. This way the polycarbonate stays strong and reinforces the ABS and minimizes deformation during the process. The long exposure to heat, in the paper, they treated parts for 3 to 7 days, supposedly fuses the ABS layers, giving it superior strength, especially in-between the layers. Sounds like a plausible idea to me and worth trying out. PC and ABS are a good combination of materials for such a task, because they are mixable and work and can fuse together. Not every material combination does work due to things like polarity and you might have experienced that in the past, when you, for example, changed materials from Nylon to PLA and noticed that the first layers don’t stick together anymore until enough material got purged.

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Well, it finally happened, and I bought myself a Mini Lathe after desiring one for years. You ask why? Well, that’s also what my wife asked. As This Old Tony once said, you always need one more milling machine, and I think that also applies to lathes. Well, I regularly have projects in mind like for example special nozzles for the Filastruder that would require such a tool. I desired having a lathe at my disposal because this is, in my opinion, one of the most honest ways to machine metal. It’s such a pleasure to dive your tool into the material, adjust the pressure with your hand and just feel the metal being peeled off. Probably also one of the reasons why I’m currently not planning to convert it to CNC, or what do you think? I don’t have a lot of space and it had to go down into my basement, so a Mini Lathe, in my case the Sieg SC2 with a 450W motor and 400mm distance between the centers, was the machine of choice. I bought mine from a local vendor that also just imports them but I hoped for more quality control on their side. The lathe was around 1000€ delivered plus another 500€ for additional tools and accessories. You can get similar models cheaper, but this one at least came with all metal gears and a tailstock with a quick lock. Even though I didn’t do any real modifications, I still took it apart, cleaned all the ways put it back together and adjusted the gib strips. The only thing I really changed is adding a Multifix Tool Post, and that thing is a piece of beauty and worth every penny!

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This is the Creality CR-6 SE that was launched for their 6th anniversary on Kickstarter and was a huge success with over $4 Million in pledges. I also received one of the beta units, just, when the Kickstarter ended and am honestly quite happy that I didn’t contribute to the hype there was around this new machine because Kickstarters can sometimes go way into the wrong direction. The reason why Creality chose Kickstarter probably wasn’t because they needed the funding, but they used this as a big marketing campaign, which did work out very well for them. You’ve probably already heard a lot about it from other sources but I’ll give you a bit more critical thoughts on it.

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Considering the view count of my other two videos on threaded inserts, you seem to be really interested in that topic. Adding threads to your assemblies doesn’t only make then look better; it also increases their functionality by adding strength to the connection and adds a reliable ways to assemble and disassemble them. I got tons of questions and suggestions below the last videos and today I’ll be tackling a couple.

One of the easiest and most inexpensive solutions for adding metal threads to your prints is using regular nuts that you can embed in a couple of different ways in your prints. We’ll be testing a pocket on the side of a part in which we slide the nut and also a pocket below our print in which we firmly seat a nut. Keep in mind that this method can’t always be used if you don’t have access from the back and from the side. Also, in comparison to the other methods, it can sometimes be hard to get the proper fit. If the pocket is too small, installing the nuts can be difficult, if it’s too big, the nuts constantly fall out and drive you crazy. I’m sure you’ve also been at that point.

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I print a lot and this also means that many of my prints run overnight. Unfortunately, our bedroom is right next to my office in which my main printers usually are. When I got into 3D printing it was a real pain because the printing noises just kept me from some good night sleep so I usually only ran them during the day. A couple of years ago I started putting cheap pavers below my machines that you can get in many different sizes from the hardware store. You can see them in plenty of my videos and viewers keep asking, what they are and why I use them.

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Don’t judge me that I’m a little late to the game, especially with the Ender-3, though I just didn’t have luck with newly released printers in the past. Having troubles with a 3D printer right out of the box, especially if you’re new, can be really frustrating, so I chose two printers that have been on the market for a while and shouldn’t have these first batch problems anymore. The Ender-3 is probably the printer most talked about and probably also the most sold of 2019. I chose the Alfawise U30 Pro as a second contestant in the comparison because the price is similar but it seems to offer quite some features that the Ender-3 Pro doesn’t have but also lacks some. But how will they really compare in the end?

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I recently bought myself a vacuum chamber that I want to use for degassing resin and vacuum casting. I thought this might also be a great new method to dry my filaments without harming them by high temperatures. Well, turn’s out, it, unfortunately, isn’t that simple and I’ll show you why in a bit. Usually, we distinguish between surface and core moisture. You can get surface moisture if you, for example, get a roll of material out of your air-conditioned house into your garage on a humid day. Moisture condenses on the material and cause problems even with non-hygroscopic material. This moisture, if it’s not soaked up by the material will quickly evaporate in normal ambient air and cause no longterm problems. Core moisture on the other hand is moisture in the material itself, and that’s what we’re usually concerned about because to get rid of it, it needs to diffuse to the outside and then evaporate there. We assist evaporation usually by heating air, which reduces the relative humidity of it. We can only dry until we reach a moisture equilibrium between the drying medium and the moist medium, which is the reason why warmed up and, therefore, dryer air can remove more moisture than cooler air. The dew point of the air characterizes this. The lower the drier and the better it will be suited for drying. Higher temperatures probably also increase the diffusion speed to transport the moisture from the inside to the outside of the material.

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Due to my recent video, I got a lot of questions how to simply add Modifier Geometry in CURA. So here is a step-by-step guide on how it’s done in CURA 4.5 but the process should be very similar, also in older releases.

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During the last weeks I wasn’t really sure what to think about 3D prints in medical and safety critical applications, because some just weren’t safe in my opinion and for others there wasn’t a lot of information around of what medical professionals and also the authorities thought about the proposed solutions. Though 3D printed face shields were becoming more and more popular especially due the great initiative that Prusa put into place. Currently there are plenty of different designs around and they have been printed in thousands the last days. I didn’t really do something in that direction because I didn’t know anyone that actively looked for them and I didn’t want to print something that landed in the trash because the professionals rejected them. This changed in the middle of this week when I got in touch with a local initiative that looked for printing capacity, had themselves already produced hundreds and were already distributing them at doctors and nursing services. So, for the first time ever, I gathered all my properly working printers that I still had, put them into my basement and started my first official small print farm. Since they were currently needing as many parts as they could get, I wanted to make sure that my print setup was as efficient as possible to crank out as many parts as I could. The design that is currently popular around here is one that is not the most efficient to print due to the big shield in the front and being hardly stackable. Though allegedly doctors liked especially that big shield in the front and I didn’t want to get involved in that discussion process.

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