Recently a company called Z-Polymers introduced its new Tullomer FDM filament that comes with a lofty bullet list of purported properties that should give materials like steel, aluminium, and various polymers a run for their money. Even better is that it is compatible with far lower specification FDM printers than e.g. PEEK. Intrigued, the folks over at All3DP figured that they should get some hands-on information on this filament and what’s it like to print with in one of the officially sanctioned Bambu Lab printers: these being the X1C & X1CE with manufacturer-provided profiles.
The world of engineering-grade FDM filaments has existed for decades, with for example PEEK (polyether ether ketone) having been around since the early 1980s, but these require much higher temperatures for the extruder (360+℃) and chamber (~90℃) than Tullomer, which is much closer (300℃, 50℃) to a typical high-performance filament like ABS, while also omitting the typical post-process annealing of PEEK. This assumes that Tullomer can match those claimed specifications, of course.
One of the current users of Tullomer is Erdos Miller, an engineering firm with a focus on the gas and oil industry. They’re using it for printing parts (calibration tooling) that used to be printed in filaments like carbon fiber-reinforced nylon (CF-PA) or PEEK, but they’re now looking at using Tullomer for replacing CF-PA and machined PEEK parts elsewhere too.
It’s still early days for this new polymer, of course, and we don’t have a lot of information beyond the rather sparse datasheet, but if you already have a capable printer, a single 1 kg spool of Tullomer is a mere $500, which is often much less or about the same as PEEK spools, without the requirement for a rather beefy industrial-strength FDM printer.
