Lighting 3D Printed Parts On Fire For Science

August 12, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

Although lighting 3D prints on fire is rarely the intended outcome, it’s possible that said print will at some point in its future come into contact with either an open flame or a significant source of heat. Once that happens, what will be the result and how worried should one be? This is basically the excuse behind [Maker’s Muse] recent decision to light some 3D prints on fire.

Crispy 3D printed combat robot. (Credit: NHRL)

Materials exposed to an open flame in this experiment included various types of PLA, PETG, ABS, ASA, TPU and PEBA. Since PLA filaments have a significant amount of carbon in them it’s little wonder that these burned quite readily, though an interesting difference was immediately visible between an Elegoo PLA+ test cone and a Prusa Galaxy Black PLA cone. The latter required a blow torch to properly ignite, after which it burned rather hot whilst melting, unlike the dirty yellow flame of the PLA+.

So-called ‘high temperature’ PLA (HTPLA) seems to actively resist burning, self-extinguishing after a blowtorch treatment. Just these few samples of PLA already gave very different results, with very likely the additives being the defining factor since pure PLA is easy to burn as a way to dispose of it somewhat cleanly.

Moving on, black PETG didn’t really want to ignite, while ABS and ASA absolutely love to burn with a sooty yellow flame. HIPS was also tested, burning in a similar sooty manner as well.

Of all the materials tested, TPU was the least flammable with even the blowtorch not able to start ignition and only melting the sample. Foam TPU did however burn the most aggressive, followed by ABS, ASA and HIPS. Overall PETG and regular TPU seem to be your best bet if you do not want your 3D print to turn into a happily burning candle and potentially a general fire hazard.

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Is Manual Filament Tuning Still Worth It?

August 11, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

In this era of consumer-grade FDM printers that have automatic bed levelling, automatic pressure advance tuning, automatic temperature regulation and so on buttoned away behind bullet-proof presets and automation, something as archaic as manual filament tuning does seem a bit out of place. Unless you’re running that hot rod Voron FDM printer, does it make sense to ‘waste time’ with manual tuning your off-the-shelf FDM printer? In a recent video [MandicReally] argues that it still makes sense to unlock more performance.

Up front it’s made clear that these auto-tuned configurations are perfectly fine for the average user, who will be perfectly happy with something like a ‘generic PLA’ preset combined with whatever auto-configuration the printer did. That said, not every filament is the same, nor is each heating element, nozzle and feeding system. In that sense it can be worth it to take a deeper look.

In the video basic aspects like preparing the material, such as properly drying, are looked at, before running through tests for temperature, flow ratio and rate, pressure advance, retraction speeds, material shrinkage etc. before doing a test between such a tuned profile versus a generic preset for ASA filament.

Although the difference isn’t night and day, the tuned profile was faster due to less conservative settings and had better accuracy on the final print due to taking the target FDM printer’s performance into account. Even if not something that the average hobbyist would be interested in, if you’re doing something like production runs with FDM, this might be something you’d want to look at.

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Continously Extruding 3D Printed Tubes With Compressed Air

August 9, 2026 by Aaron Beckendorf 12 Comments

[Jan] of [Roetz 4.0] has a unique approach to multi-material 3D printing: he’s designed an extruder which takes two different materials and extrudes one as a shell around the other. This opens up some interesting possibilities, such as a conductive filament surrounded by an insulating shell; [Jan], however, didn’t have an immediate use for the process, so he moved on to a related technique: extruding plastic tubes with a compressed-air core.

The extruder he used for this was a variation on the dual-material extruder; it takes in two strands of filament, melts them, and extrudes them as a shell around the outlet of a compressed-air line, which was controlled by a high-precision pressure regulator. During testing with PLA, it seemed capable of extruding airtight tubes of filament, though it had a tendency to blow bubbles and form tubes with inconsistent diameters. The low thermal conductivity of the stainless steel extruder also proved problematic; coupled with the cooling effect of the compressed air, filament sometimes solidified inside the extruder.

[Jan] found it almost impossible to get consistent results using only pressure-based control; as the layer of molten plastic around the air gets thinner, it provides less resistance to further ballooning, leading to continuous expansion until the bubble bursts. Controlling the volume of air extruded provided much more consistent results, and in a second video, he built a peristaltic pump to do just that. He also switched to using TPU filament, which greatly improved layer adhesion. When inflated with compressed air, the finished TPU structures expanded slightly, though there were still air leaks. The results look promising, and TU Darmstadt has already carried out some research in this area.

In a separate research project, we’ve seen a similar multi-material co-extrusion approach used to print pneumatic channels. For more on the history of [Jan]’s multi-filament extruder, check out his Minuteman printer. Continue reading “Continously Extruding 3D Printed Tubes With Compressed Air” →

A man's hands are shown holding a broken 3D-printed hook. The hook has a loop and hook, in a number 9-shape. The hook portion has broken, exposing carbon fibers.

Strengthening 3D Prints With A Carbon-Fiber Epidermis

August 4, 2026 by Aaron Beckendorf 11 Comments

As strong and light as carbon fiber-epoxy composites are, the same can’t always be said of carbon-fiber reinforced 3D printer filaments. Of those that do improve over stock filament, the best performance comes from long, continuous strands, but the printers that can embed these are quite expensive. [MagicLAG], looking for a cheaper method, made something even stronger: prints reinforced with subsurface carbon-fiber cloth.

They tried a few other methods first, including pausing the print and manually embedding carbon fiber strands, ironing strands into the finished part, and ironing carbon fiber cloth into the bottom layer. For the main method, though, he printed the test part in three pieces: a core part, and two outer shell layers. Between the core and the shell is a small gap, into which carbon-fiber cloth can be epoxied. Under good conditions (not using quick-setting epoxy), this mostly preserves the outer surface and dimensional accuracy.

To test the various strengthening methods, [MagicLAG] printed hooks and tensioned them on a load cell until failure. None of the methods using single-stranded fiber showed any improvement; the fiber simply bent and let the surrounding plastic break. As a control for the epidermal cloth parts, they printed shells and cores and epoxied them together. These controls performed better than the standard parts, but not nearly as well as the carbon-fiber cloth composites. With only a few layers of cloth, these more than tripled the yield strength of the basic hook.

If you’d rather use a carbon-fiber filament, the type of plastic matters; carbon fiber makes PLA, at least, weaker. Regardless of form, some caution is called for whenever handling carbon fiber, since it seems to show some asbestos-like effects.

Commercialization And Innovation

August 1, 2026 by Elliot Williams 17 Comments

The last year or two has seen relatively affordable multi-material printers hit the market, and the question that [Tom Nardi] and I were kicking around when he was writing up the 2025 year-in-review article was what it was going to mean for our folks. I don’t think he got it wrong per se, but his heading for that section “Grandma is 3D-Printing in Color” only tells half the story.

He did get that part right, though. We’ve certainly seen a flourishing of multi-material designs out there that take advantage of the availability of (usually) four colors. The ability to print in color has given life to the purely decorative models, of course. Think full-color Pokemon desktop toys, for instance. But even functional prints have benefited from contrasting color labels printed right into the box, not to even mention the multi-material supports that pull off easier and cleaner than ever before.

Since most of these multi-filament machines are pretty much locked down as far as hardware tinkering goes, our sights were firmly locked on what the end-user would do with the new capability. But we overlooked the third axis of 3D printering: the software hackers. And it’s precisely in this area of slicer and path-planning that we’ve seen some of the coolest developments this year. Why? Because people have the hardware in their hands that they need to test out the algorithms.

FullSpectrum and the more recent ImageMap are two techniques to get the missing in-between colors out of a four-filament printer, and in particular ImageMap tries to get the job done faster, and with fewer purges. We are amazed to see two different approaches to color blending popping up in just a few months of each other, and we have no doubt that work on this is going to continue.

At the end of the day, this really is just “put new tools in the hands of creative hackers, and they’ll find new ways to use them”, so we shouldn’t have been surprised at all. But if this is what comes out of the commercialization of the multi-material printer, what’s going to come when some of the more esoteric machine designs go mainstream? We can’t wait to find out!

An owl printed with detailed color patterns

New Method Accelerates Color 3D Printing

July 23, 2026 by Julian Scheffers 35 Comments

Multi-color 3D printing is notorious for being difficult to get right. Even with modern printers, you often end up using much more filament (and tool changes) than you would for a single-color print. [YKG3D] shows us a new method of color printing that needs far fewer tool changes. It’s the work of [SentientStardust] and you can check it out here.

Based on 2018 research, the new slicer rotates through its palette of colors each layer. Then, either by adjusting the amount of filament dispensed or by displacing the edges, the prominence of each color is adjusted. The result is smoother gradients and better color blending — and it prints faster too!

Of course, nothing is perfect: the more base colors you add, the thicker your apparent layer lines will be. For example, a 3-color print with 0.2 mm layer height will appear as having 0.6 mm layer height. A different issue happens when the walls get too steep; the color blending illusion starts to break down.

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Giving Resin 3D Printers Another Shot After Six Years

July 21, 2026 by Maya Posch 26 Comments

My initial experience with a 3D printer came in 2020, when I got access to a buddy’s Creality LD-002R SLA printer. This was one of those awkward transition phases for SLA printers, where inefficient RGB LCDs finally got replaced by monochrome LCD panels, thus massively reducing the required exposure time and increasing the LCD panel’s lifespan.

The closely related Creality LD-002H is a monochrome SLA printer, but as this wasn’t the one that this friend opted for we had to learn the ropes on this more old-school printer. In terms of specifications this meant a build volume of 119 mm x 65 mm x 160 mm to play with and a claimed 26.1 µm resolution. Despite some struggles along the way, this machine churned out impressively high levels of detail with whatever cheap resin we threw at it, and even the post-printing processing became easy once we added a flex plate to the build plate and tweaked the cleaning and curing steps.

Despite all these positives, we both drifted away from resin printing, mostly due to the still messy and smelly printing process. FDM printers seemed like a better deal, especially after said buddy got his mittens on a used IDEX FDM printer. I would eventually go through a rather loathsome Creality Ender V2 experience before ending up with my current-day Elegoo Neptune 4, and resin printing seemed to be a thing of the past for me. Until recently, that is.

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