[Zack], in addition to being a snappy dresser, has a thing for strange 3D printing filament. How strange? Well, in a recent video, he looks at filaments that require 445 C. Even the build plate has to be super hot. He also looks at filament that seems like iron, one that makes you think it is rubber, and a bunch of others.
As you might expect, he’s not using a conventional 3D printer. Although you might be able to get your more conventional printer to handle some of these, especially with some hacking. There is filament with carbon fiber, glass fiber, and more exotic add-ons.
Most of the filaments need special code to get everything working. While you might think you can’t print these engineering filaments, it stands to reason that hobby-grade printers are going to get better over time (as they already have). If the day is coming when folks will be able to print any of these on their out-of-the-box printer, we might as well start researching them now.
If you fancy a drinking game, have a shot every time he changes shots and a double when the Hackaday Prize T-shirt shows up.
Can confirm the third paragraph. The last thing i want to do is experiment with the limits of the printer, so i used PLA for a decade and barely gave ‘advanced filaments’ like PETG or Nylon a glance. The heated bed, the stronger and more-constrained extruder, the high-temp hot end…all too much for me. But now the cheapest printer i could find does a great job at PETG and it’s the only thing i use.
Ahhh, remember when ABS was what we all printed with, and PLA was the tricky new filament on the scene?
No
Yeah, me neither. There were reasons to use ABS instead of PLA, but ease of printing was not one of them.