Truly Transparent Filament

[aag 6]

Once printed, the Ultimaker "Transparent PLA" filament is anything but transparent! Does anybody know of any material that is printable with an Ultimaker S5 and retains full (or almost full) transparency after printing? I'd be enormously grateful for any advice!

[Smithy 1,144]

Some had good results with colorFabb HT material. but you could try also some other PETG. Truly transparent is hard with an FDM printer, but you can get good results with bigger layer heights and 100% infill.

 

Some postprocessing is also good for transparency, so you could try to polish or apply some resin or epoxy like Smooth-On to get a smooth surface without the layer lines.

[kmanstudios 1,120]

This is a good guide for printing transparents filaments. It is valid for all transparent filaments.

 

http://taulman3d.com/t-glase-features.html

 

And, yes, definitely the post processing.

 

http://taulman3d.com/t-glase-optics.html

[geert_2 557]

If I remember well, user |Robert| did some tests and got good results; the best I have seen on this forum. Maybe you can find that post?

 

With PET (brand ICE) I can only get a sort of "frosted glass" look, but not transparent. I got the best results when printing slow, so that the material has enough time to melt well in the nozzle, and then to flow into all corners while printing. And the material should be very dry, so you don't get entrapped bubbles because of steam formation. Printing in thick layers also helps, but then you need to print even slower to get it to flow well. Reducing fans also helps, so the next layers bond better to the previous layers: this makes it stronger and lets light through better. A bit to my surprise, printing at the cooler edge of the temp range, also improved transparency, but I am not sure why.