Week 41, 2015 – October Acquisitions
Gotta feed that printer! Filament from hell to breakfast, read the breakdown after the jump!Okay, this month I’m putting the cool stuff up front!
3D Printing
Push Plastic (3D Printer Filament)
This month Push Plastic had some clearance items, including their 5-packs of randomly-chosen 0.2kg PLA samples. I figured it was a good way to check out all their colors, and boy was I right! They had some colors of filament for $21 a spool, and I could get 1kg in 5-color random bundles for $18… Normal price on a spool from Push is $29.
Lavender PLA Filament, 1kg Spool — ($21 – Push Plastic)
This is a nice soft purple, unlike the garishly bright or pointlessly too-dark purples many other brands offer. It makes me think of purple-colored pencil erasers and bubblegum.
Redwood Brown PLA Filament, 1kg Spool — ($21 – Push Plastic)
A very nice red-brown. It’ll be a good color to have when I one day figure out how to do detailed multi-color printing and actually ‘print’ wood grain into parts using the Diamond Hotend.
PLA Color Packs RANDOM COLORS, 5x 200g Coils — ($18 x2 – Push Plastic)
Well, first of all… They accidentally only sent me one. But when I noticed, I told them and they apologized and shipped the second one out immediately. So now I know how good their customer service is. Anyway, I got: Black, Red, Orange, Purple, and Translucent Green in the first pack. And White, Metallic Gold, Dark Grey, Pink, Teal, and Translucent Blue in the second pack. I can’t wait to print swatches of all of them!
PrintedSolid (3D Printer Filament)
This seemed like a cool place, and they import colorFabb filament from Holland, as well providing small samples of ProtoPasta filament. They even threw a tiny– almost novelty-small –bag of Haribo gummy bears. I didn’t open them, it’s such a cute little bag. Seriously, it’s like the size of a large sugar packet. Only complaint I have about them, is that they don’t display prominently the fact that the colorFabb PLA/PHA is 3/4 kilo spools… So they’re really even more expensive per-kg. :(
Shining Silver colorFabb PLA/PHA Filament, 750g Spool — ($38.99 – PrintedSolid)
A fantastic metallic filament. Unlike the other silver filaments I have, this seems to have a lighter base filament, where the others had like a translucent black or grey, which made them darken when polished. And PLA/PHA is proving to be very nice; if you’re not familiar with PHA, to quote Wikipedia:
Polyhydroxyalkanoates or PHAs are linear polyesters produced in nature by bacterial fermentation of sugar or lipids. They are produced by the bacteria to store carbon and energy. More than 150 different monomers can be combined within this family to give materials with extremely different properties. These plastics are biodegradeable and are used in the production of bioplastics.
PLA/PHA is more UV stable, has higher impact strength (one of the big advantages ABS has over PLA) and is somewhat less susceptible to moisture.
Pale Gold colorFabb PLA/PHA Filament, 750g Spool — ($38.99 – PrintedSolid)
Rather like the above, this is lighter-colored than other gold filaments. Very nice.
ProtoPasta Conductive PLA Filament, 125g Coil — ($17.00 – PrintedSolid)
Haven’t had a chance to try this yet, but it’s really the ‘original’ conductive filament, it’s like the standard everyone uses for comparison.
Other
Ever since I saw a video demonstrating it, I’ve been wanting to get some Polyetherimide (More commonly referred to as PEI) to slap on a second borosilicate glass print bed.
Borosilicate Glass Sheet – 0.25″ Thick, 9″ wide, 6″ long — ($19.02 – McMaster-Carr)
The first borosilicate bed I got, I paid like $35 for on eBay. Normally I check McMaster for my raw materials first, but for something like glass, I just assumed that either they wouldn’t have it, they wouldn’t have it in the exact size I needed it, or it’d be prohibitively expensive to get it cut to size. But someone on /r/3DPrinting set me straight, and sure enough when I looked there it was. Hell, they even have decent prices on borosilicate glass discs, perfect for delta printer heatbeds.
It came wrapped in a 6-inch diameter ball of self-adhesive bubblewrap (I didn’t even know that was a thing, but the flat side was tacky and allowed it to wrap securely to itself without tape.) as well as a bit of foam…nonetheless, there was a tiny chip out of the edge… Figures.
Polyetherimide Sheet – 0.03″ Thick, 12″ x 12″– ($16.20 – Amazon)
A sheet of PEI, it had a nasty saw-cut edge with these jagged burrs that almost took a bite out of my hand… But eh. It’s got protective film on both sides.
TapeCase 468MP Adhesive Transfer Tape (3M), 12″ x 12″ sheet, 6-pack — ($17.80 – Amazon)
Can’t say much about this except I didn’t like the price when all I really needed was half of ONE sheet… Well, technically I could use one whole sheet, if I use the remainder of the PEI to do another bed…but I digress.
Electronics
Yes, this month I actually ordered something other than 3D printing stuff! Can you believe it? But in the interest of getting this published only a month late— as I sit here writing this, on a cold November morning, two days and change before Fallout 4 drops on my life like so many nuclear bombs –I’m going to finish this part later!