dannyoneill

Oh, and further to my post above, - and feel free to remove this if its against forum rules - but I bought from formfutura and tend to get most of my filament there are they are great - incredibly quick given that I am not in the same country and very helpful staff willing to give honest appraisals of their various products.

Hey all, Couldn't find any other interesting discussions of this. I don't have an Ultimater but rather a Velleman K8200, so please forgive intrusion!! It's a printer though, stepper motors, belts, hot-end, usual bits, so hopefully you wont all hate me for not having the same kit I have been trying Laybrick over the last few days and it really is excellent. The quality is quite particular. One person above described it as 'soft' or 'warm' or something, which gives an idea that this really isn't like plastic after printing. It's temp related characteristics are very interesting. The post print finishing is very fun, sanding works well, maching polishing not well. Acetone works too vigorously, but isopropyl alcohol works just right, you can polish things interestingly with just a swirl in IPA, or use finger / brush with IPA to smooth bits. It's strength isn't great, but then I'm used to freakily strong PLA / ABS in their own particular ways, but for aesthetic builds its plenty strong enough. When still soft (>2hrs post print) thin layers are incredibly flexible. I am getting clogging occasionally though. Admittedly it seems to be more the last two days than I was getting initially, so might be that the reel is getting humid. It is happening consistently at a point in the print (same gcode that worked well for first few prints) at a layer where there are a lot of retractions, I'm not sure if that is exacerbating some moisture issue or if I was just lucky the first few times and actually the material / my retraction settings / both are not working brilliantly. Admittedly, although I had test printed at 165 - 220 for testing (all worked well with decreasing surface smoothness), my first few complex prints were at 167.5 whereas I increased that to 178 which was necessary to get the extrusion flow right when running at a higher speed. I will try dropping the temp, but if that doesn't help, swap for the other reel I have in the dehumidifier. I should swap more often really, but every filament removal carries about a 1/25 chance of snapping I find and so I tend to try to avoid if poss to avoid having to take the hot-end apart to remove bits. Oh and for the record I have a 0.5mm extruder nozzle. Anyway, can't recommend the stuff enough. Don't let my bit of clogging put you off - I wasn't getting it to start with so hopefully a fixable issue and it is happening at a point where I am printing layers with text formed of inverted triangular cross-section with about a 4mm font size, so there must be >100 retractions just for the 20 characters I'm printing at least, and that would be a challenge for any remotely brittle material. The retractions as far as retractions go (tendency to leave strings / blobs / under-extrusions) are actually great, no less good than standard PLA. Anyway, glad I stumbled across this forum - the review linked above of the material is genuinely one of the best online reviews of anything I have ever read! Oh yes, I suppose I should mention the bits which I didn't have issues with as well, for completeness: I didn't bother spooling at all, just suspended on a bar and lossened the reel a bit by hand and that feeds excellently, no need to warm, but then the room is a fairly toasty 25C, so that might be helping. My bed is topped by mirror glass for levelness, but this proved far too good for adhesion with first few prints so I'm now using tape. Others use something called kapton tape I think, I'm not sure if this is a US brand or soemthing, but it looks in pictures just like what I call 'Insulating Tape' or 'Electrical Tape' and which is very cheap in the UK and works perfectly for this Laybrick. Oh yes, an I found that the first layer doesn't need any compression into the tape - most plastics for me need a very thin first layer to get a mirror like underside, but this stuff can be deposited with the head a good 0.15mm above the surface and still get a faultless first layer.