Looking for inexpensive prototyping PLA filament, Hatchbox?

[Choclit99 0]

I recently upgraded from the 1.75 mm filament world to the 2.85 mm filament world when I upgraded to my new S5.  I am looking for a brand of low price but high quality standard PLA for prototyping.  I will generally be using Ultimaker brand filaments for production work but can't think of any reason to use these for initial design prototyping.

 

I was using Hatchbox brand pLA with my previous Creality system with great results.  Does anyone have experience with Hatchbox PLA with an S5?  If that is not a good choice, what would people recommend?  I will just use white and black for prototypes.

[Mari 38]

Are there any bad PLA Brands?

[GregValiant 1,411]

I purchased some Sunla silky silver PLA from Amazon.  It was in a vacuum bag with a silica pack, but it was full of water.  It may have been a shelf-life thing but I wanted the color and Matter Hacker was out of stock.  Useless even after 6 hours in the de-humidifier.  There just isn't any layer adhesion.  The truly annoying part is that it looks really good until the steam explosions start to tear things apart.

[Mari 38]

There is always the risk of buying old or wrongly stored material...

[fbrc8-erin 302]

Kimya does a PLA-R with recycled PLA that prints really nicely that's good for prototyping. 

[Carla_Birch 116]

On 12/18/2020 at 1:16 PM, Mari said:

Are there any bad PLA Brands?

Yep, I once give amazon own filament a try because at the time due to covid it was the only thing i could get and i have never had blocked print cores till i used that filament, even after full cleaning of the printcore it would still block the core, swapping to other filament and no more blocks again.

[jsw 19]

Hatchbox is my go-to filament brand, when I can get it, that is.  I've had very good luck with Hatchbox in ABS, PLA and PETg.

 

Ever since the Covid hit the fan last March or so, it seems like Hatchbox availability has been spotty.

 

Paramount, Overture and RepRapper are other brands that I've had good luck with.