I guess everybody who’s owning a 3D printer for a while has heard about annealing prints to make them stronger and more heat resistant. The idea is pretty simple: You heat up your oven to a certain temperature, toss your parts in and after 30 to 60 minutes, you switch it off and let everything cool down slowly. There are plenty of videos about it here on YouTube and I also already made a couple and showed how that process can improve the heat resistance of PLA from 60 to even 180°C or increase stiffness. Though besides Tom’s video where he investigated the strength of annealed PLA in his Filaween series, there isn’t a lot of information about the change in strength around. This is why I finally thought it’s time to perform an investigation which is at least a bit scientific, in order to find out if rumors like if we can really fuse layers together and similar things really hold true. This will be a video series and, in this first video, we’ll take a look at the most common material, PLA. In the future I also want to find out if we can improve the mechanical properties of materials like PETG, ABS, Nylon or Polycarbonate.

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