twoBEars bioFila linen
Posted: March 6th, 2017, 10:34 am
As I could not find much on said filament here (only one mention by Izzy), I wanted to share my opinion on this.
First of all: It is pretty expensive (±50€ / kg), so why bother dealing with it?
I bought a spool back when twoBEars first introduced the new material. It came on a cardboard spool which was pretty unusable for me, as it featured a 20ish mm hole to put on a thin spool holder (Prusa or similar maybe?). I ended up manually re-winding it on an empty plastic spool I had on hand. After test-printing some smaller models, I figured that it does very well with thin-walled models and has a nice »fibery« surface finish, making it perfect for lamp shade, or vase like structures. Also, sanding the surface worked out OK — better than with PLA at least — but you need to be careful with temperature i.e. slow sanding / wet sanding.
The molten material is very fluid, so you get a LOT of stringing in case of non-continuous printing, as well as surface blobbing. So you need to setup your slicer carefully, looking for the most constant printing motion possible.
The first batch of material I got had a problem however. The material on the spool was very brittle and I had a lot of failed prints due to filament breakage at the feeder. I emailed twoBEars and they sent out a new spool immediately, asking me to please send back the material I got for looking into the issue. There was no further issue of breakage with the new spool.
One thing that kept me from printing the rest of the material however was another major problem:
After switching from bioFila linen back to PLA (a lot of thorough cleaning with atomic pulls involved, as I always with do when changing material), I more or less instantly was left with a heavily clogged nozzle assembly. The PLA literary welded on to the nozzle AND brass pipe in my UMO+'s hot-end. I tried polishing up the internals after removing the stuck material, but it would not last very long until the next heavy clogging appeared.
The only way to get my printer up an running again was by exchanging the brass parts in total.
At first I thought, the brass parts were already worn out and needed replacement anyway, but two weeks later I gave the bioFila another shot and after changing back to PLA the same f**king issue occurred again! Once again I had to drop in a whole new set of brass parts, spending another 50€ on genuine Ultimaker spare parts. This was actually the moment where I started ordering parts from Asia and making my own stuff on a lathe. (## Insert rant about spare part prices from UM her! ##)
As you can see, I have a very ambivalent opinion on the filament. On the one hand, it has some unique characteristics, especially in surface finish and single-wall printing. On the other hand, you need a dedicated print head (IMO) to not run into crazy cross-contamination issues. Leaving alone the fact that it is really expensive stuff.
I could search for some pictures of the prints and also my notes on the printing parameters I worked out so far.
Please let me know, if you are interested
Regards, Frederik
First of all: It is pretty expensive (±50€ / kg), so why bother dealing with it?
I bought a spool back when twoBEars first introduced the new material. It came on a cardboard spool which was pretty unusable for me, as it featured a 20ish mm hole to put on a thin spool holder (Prusa or similar maybe?). I ended up manually re-winding it on an empty plastic spool I had on hand. After test-printing some smaller models, I figured that it does very well with thin-walled models and has a nice »fibery« surface finish, making it perfect for lamp shade, or vase like structures. Also, sanding the surface worked out OK — better than with PLA at least — but you need to be careful with temperature i.e. slow sanding / wet sanding.
The molten material is very fluid, so you get a LOT of stringing in case of non-continuous printing, as well as surface blobbing. So you need to setup your slicer carefully, looking for the most constant printing motion possible.
The first batch of material I got had a problem however. The material on the spool was very brittle and I had a lot of failed prints due to filament breakage at the feeder. I emailed twoBEars and they sent out a new spool immediately, asking me to please send back the material I got for looking into the issue. There was no further issue of breakage with the new spool.
One thing that kept me from printing the rest of the material however was another major problem:
After switching from bioFila linen back to PLA (a lot of thorough cleaning with atomic pulls involved, as I always with do when changing material), I more or less instantly was left with a heavily clogged nozzle assembly. The PLA literary welded on to the nozzle AND brass pipe in my UMO+'s hot-end. I tried polishing up the internals after removing the stuck material, but it would not last very long until the next heavy clogging appeared.
The only way to get my printer up an running again was by exchanging the brass parts in total.
At first I thought, the brass parts were already worn out and needed replacement anyway, but two weeks later I gave the bioFila another shot and after changing back to PLA the same f**king issue occurred again! Once again I had to drop in a whole new set of brass parts, spending another 50€ on genuine Ultimaker spare parts. This was actually the moment where I started ordering parts from Asia and making my own stuff on a lathe. (## Insert rant about spare part prices from UM her! ##)
As you can see, I have a very ambivalent opinion on the filament. On the one hand, it has some unique characteristics, especially in surface finish and single-wall printing. On the other hand, you need a dedicated print head (IMO) to not run into crazy cross-contamination issues. Leaving alone the fact that it is really expensive stuff.
I could search for some pictures of the prints and also my notes on the printing parameters I worked out so far.
Please let me know, if you are interested
Regards, Frederik