• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Looks interesting. My primary focus is on engineering materials, but I’d love a truly biodegradable draft filament and I’m willing to put in a bit of time working out how to make it work with my equipment. Looking at Colorfabb’s site, it appears they only sell it in 750g spools which is incredibly frustrating considering my intended use. For a draft filament, the bigger the roll, the better!


  • i recently got back into printing. I had some PLA, some PETG, some ABS and some ASA all of which had sat for longer than that. After thorough drying in a dehydrator, a couple of rolls just didn’t cooperate but most did. The troublesome ones may not have been very good to start - unbranded mystery stuff.


  • That is spot-on what works for me. Warm soapy water has given me the best results with a PEI plate. The chamber heat soak is also big for these troublesome filaments. My printing gear lives in a closet and for trouble prints, I will crank up the bed, and my filament dryer for a half-hour or so to get reliable chamber temps.



  • I feel like it’s finally at the point where the issues are minor enough that I have the patience to deal with them. I’ve been using the release candidates for the last couple of weeks and mostly it comes down to remembering to save regularly and occasionally having to shut it down and restart. Honestly, some of the commercial solutions aren’t drastically better in that respect!

    I think anyone coming from a place where they have a ton of experience in SolidWorks or Fusion might want to hold out a little longer, though it’s definitely worth a try. If you’re coming from a place where you have to learn a new program anyway, you might as well learn the free option that will only continue to improve.







  • I was recently roughly in the same place. I have played around in the past with a few things, but there were reasons I didn’t really get into any of them: Fusion360 and their increasingly limited free options, OnShape and their online only thing… so on…

    FreeCad has a new release candidate for what they’re calling version 1.0, meaning they consider it a mature and functional piece of software. I’ve been working with it, and yeah… it’s not perfect, but it’s definitely usable now. I figured if I was going to put all that effort into learning something, I might as well learn something that would always be free.


  • Yeah, honestly that was at least partially my thought process posting this. I see someone else posted the same video and got a bit more traction as well, which is great: the more eyes on this, the more likely someone chooses to develop it. If someone develops a fork or plugin for various open source slicers, it’s usefulness should quickly become obvious and someone with deeper pockets will wind up going after the BS patent. Even as little as a 10% improvement in layer adhesion, if it’s reliable and consistent, is a significant upgrade. The old saying about a chain only being as strong as the weakest link comes to mind and layer adhesion is the weakest link in 3d printing.