Printing FDM Filaments That Are Just Plain Weird

August 17, 2026 by Maya Posch 18 Comments

The fun thing about thermopolymers like PLA is that you can blend in additives, some of which are necessary to make it at all usable, while so many other additives are either just cosmetic or arguably just plain weird. In a recent video, [Zack Freedman] goes over some of the weirdest ones that he’s come across so far.

These range from the pretty-normal-but-unusual, like CMYK sets of filament for full-color printing, to the rather unusual, like very silky PETG and foamy TPU and TPE, all the way to the WTAF ones, such as Timeplast filaments that can be used as soap as well as fish food.

He also tried a range of filaments that vie for being the blackest filament possible, while others pretend to be paper or are made out of literal landfill trash. Some hit your olfactory senses with a hammer by smelling like all the lemons just got squirted right up into your nose, purportedly to keep flies at bay. There is also pumpkin spice-flavored PLA, for when you really need to make the holidays extra fragrant.

Overall, the range of filaments here is quite dizzying, with some being actually practical, while others are mostly about their green credentials, or about being pretty or having a specific olfactory experience. Whether any of them are for you depends. Do you have a longing for 3D prints that smell like pumpkin spice or are fish food? We’ve noticed before that [Zack] likes strange filament.

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Lighting 3D Printed Parts On Fire For Science

August 12, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 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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Testing Whether Heated Chambers Help Brittle Filaments

March 17, 2026 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

Some FDM filaments are pretty brittle even if properly dried and stored, especially those which contain carbon fiber (CF) or similar additives like glass fiber (GF). This poses a problem in that these filaments can snap even within the PTFE tube as they’re being guided towards the extruder. Here a community theory is that having an actively heated chamber can help prevent this scenario, but is it actually true? [Dr. Igor Gaspar] of the My Tech Fun YouTube channel gave this myth a try to either confirm or bust it.

The comments suggested that heating the chamber to 65°C will help, but there’s little information online to support this theorem. To test the claim, a heated chamber was used along with a bending rig to see at which angle the filament would snap. In total five different filaments from three manufacturers (Polymaker, Qidi and YXPolyer) were tested, including Qidi’s PET-GF and PAHT-GF as the sole non-CF filaments.

A big question is how long exactly the filament will spend inside the heated chamber after making its way from the spool, which would be about 2.5 minutes with a 500 mm tube. For the test 5 minutes was used for the best possible result. Despite this, the results show that even with the standard deviation kept in mind, the heating actually seems to make the filaments even more brittle.

Considering that in general CF seems to simply weaken the polymer matrix after printing, this finding adds to the question of whether these CF and GF-infused filaments make any sense at all.

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Rare Filament Makes Weird Benchies

November 20, 2025 by Al Williams 22 Comments

[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.

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Fail Of The Week: Beaker To Benchy More Bothersome Than Believed

October 20, 2025 by Tyler August No comments

Making nylon plastic from raw chemicals used to be a very common demo; depending where and when you grew up, you may well have done it in high school or even earlier. What’s not common is taking that nylon and doing something with it, like, say extruding it into filament to make a benchy. [Startup Chuck] shows us there might be a reason for that. (Video, embedded below.)

It starts out well enough: sebacoyl chloride and hexamethaline diamine mix up and do their polymerizing tango to make some nylon, just like we remember. (Some of us also got to play with mercury bare-handed; safety standards have changed and you’ll want to be very careful if you try this reaction at home). The string of nylon [Chuck] pulls from the beaker even looks a little bit like filament for a second, at least until it breaks and gets tossed into a blobby mess. We wonder if it would be possible to pull nylon directly into 1.75 mm filament with the proper technique, but quality control would be a big issue. Even if you could get a consistent diameter, there’d likely be too much solvent trapped inside to safely print.

Of course, melting the nylon with a blowtorch and trying to manually push the liquid through a die to create filament has its own quality control problems. That’s actually where this ends: no filament, and definitely no benchy. [Chuck] leaves the challenge open to anyone else who wants to take the crown. Perhaps one of you can show him how it’s done. We suspect it would be easiest to dry the homemade nylon and shred it into granules and only then extrude them, like was done with polypropylene in this mask-recycling project. Making filament from granules or pellets is something we’ve seen more than once over the years.

If you really want to make plastic from scratch, ordering monomers from Sigma-Aldrich might not cut it for ultimate bragging rights; other people are starting with pulling CO2 from the atmosphere.

Thanks to [Chaz] for the tip! Remember that the tips line isn’t just for your successes– anything interesting can find its home here.

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PVDF: The Specialized Filament For Chemical And Moisture Resistance

August 28, 2025 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

There’s a dizzying number of specialist 3D printing materials out there, some of which do try to offer an alternative to PLA, PA6, ABS, etc., while others are happy to stay in their own niche. Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) is one of these materials, with the [My Tech Fun] YouTube channel recently getting sent a spool of PVDF for testing, which retails for a cool $188.

Some of the build plate carnage observed after printing with PVDF. (Credit: My Tech Fun, YouTube)

Reading the specifications and datasheet for the filament over at the manufacturer’s website it’s pretty clear what the selling points are for this material are. For the chemists in the audience the addition of fluoride is probably a dead giveaway, as fluoride bonds in a material tend to be very stable. Hence PVDF ((C₂H₂F₂)_n) sees use in applications where strong resistance to aggressive chemicals as well as hydrolysis are a requirement, not to mention no hygroscopic inclinations, somewhat like PTFE and kin.

In the video’s mechanical testing it was therefore unsurprising that other than abrasion resistance it’s overall worse and more brittle than PA6 (nylon). It was also found that printing this material with two different FDM printers with the required bed temperature of 110°C was somewhat rough, with some warping and a wrecked engineering build plate in the Bambu Lab printer due to what appears to be an interaction with the usual glue stick material. Once you get the print settings dialed in it’s not too complicated, but it’s definitely not a filament for casual use.

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