After printing ABS almost exclusively for about a decade, I'm rediscovering PLA and its fancy variants ( feddit.it )

I think 1kg spools are too much, I want to experiment with ALL THE COLORS... But few manufacturers offer 250g, and they are sometimes twice the cost by weight.
https://feddit.it/pictrs/image/2658590c-535c-4523-9dd2-25663ba7bc23.webp

JohnEdwa ,
@JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz avatar

PLA as a raw material is really cheap - you can get it for as little as a few dollars a kilo - and a lot of the cost of a filament roll is just making the spool, packaging, and shipping it. In the end, the price difference between 250g and 1kg of PLA on a roll is rather tiny.
Goes the other way too, you can buy 5kg rolls that come down to just $10-15/kg.

The same reason why a can of cola is so expensive compared to a big bottle.

nezbyte ,

I buy samples from Atomic Filament when I don’t know which filament would work best for a project. They are 50g spools for under $4 each. It is usually enough filament to print out a filament sample card and a small test piece.

mindlight ,

That's $80 per kg.

Thorry84 ,

Agreed, large spools are too much if you want to play around with all the colors. I have a box of old filament, each spool in plastic with a dry packet and the whole box with a couple of bags of drying stuff and a good seal on the top. But after getting a spool out to use recently (spool about 2 year old) and it printed like shit. I tried putting it in a dryer, but it didn't help. So I tried more of these spools and they almost all seem to have gone bad.

Such a shame, I should have bought smaller spools, but they are harder to get and often more expensive.

JetpackJackson ,

Yeah we just had that happen here, dug up old spools and they print pretty badly lol

Damage OP ,

TBH old plastic printed badly when it was new as well, materials keep improving.

JetpackJackson ,

That's true.

Damage OP ,

Last month I finally gave up and threw away a 10-year-old roll of PLA, there was no way to get it to print decently.

JohnEdwa ,
@JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz avatar

You did try drying it in a dehydrator before you did that, right?
Because I have spools almost that old, they print fine after a night in there. Brittle as dry spaghetti if I don't though.

Damage OP ,

Obviously

clif ,
@clif@lemmy.world avatar

Same. I go through periods of printing a lot then getting busy and not touching it for months. I've noticed my PLA and PLA+ get really brittle as they age even when stored in a dry box and drying again before use.

I can usually get it to print but I have to be gentle with it.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • kbinchat
  • All magazines
    •