Buying filament in the uk

I am halfway through building my Mendel 90.
I need to buy filament and am unsure about quality of material out there.
Buying 3 mm pla on eBay seems cheap but I don't want to slew things up for the sake of saving a few pounds.
What should I expect to be paying per kg or per mtr? Any sugestions for uk suppliers please?
Regards
Steve

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Specialist prop makers. Pattern making,Fibreglass, foam carving, moulds, silicone rubber,
rotational moulding, resin casting, Robotics, product design and prototyping, Jesmonite
Teaching and Masterclasses
www.articolestudios.co.uk
www.articoleprops.co.uk

[www.faberdashery.co.uk] sell great quality pla. They sell by the meter too so you can get a good range of colours and see what you like.

I would recommend getting a range of colours from faberdashery, because it's great quality when you're starting out. Don't buy less than 20m of one colour, since you'll waste a fair bit starting out. I now exclusively get plastic from repraper.com, because it's so much cheaper (about £24 a kilo delivered vs nearly £40 from faberdashery). I only print 3mm pla, where I think quality matters just a little less (variation is less of a percentage difference, and i've heard worse things about repraper 1.75mm stuff), and printing 20kg i've had one small jam, and wasted a couple of meters, but saved a huge amount of money overall. It really depends what you're doing - I've printed nearly 40kg in total so the odd failed print is easily worth the large cost saving of "worse" filament.

Thanks guys .. Good advice. My kit came with some green from Faberdashery.
I checked out Repraper.com and ordered 5 kg in white. With fed ex shipping it came to £113 which is about £23 kg
Im not sure if if it's coming from China or Hong Kong
£23 kg is cheaper than pla being sold on eBay
It will be interesting to see how I get on with it
Regards Steve

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/06/2013 05:21PM by Ukrobotman.

I could be way off the mark here, but is there not a little more to add to the total from repraper.com being delivered to the UK?

Isn't there the potential of +6.50% import duty, then VAT, and then a handling fee from the courier? Sorry just trying to work out my options buying here in the UK.

There's the potential, I hadn't even thought of it though since I've never had to pay anything extra. It may be it just doesn't look at all valuable, or I may have been lucky.

At 23L /100m check some euro distributors. no risk of import duty, VAT already included and a 100m spool will be around 22-25€ or less. I use formfutura and i find their PLA good, but there is several others that are cheaper. The 15% difference between moneys will cover shipping if you group your order a little (shipping 20€/5kg down to 34€ for 20kg).

Simply when seing price below 20€, be cautious and ask a sample, some filament is not very good.

My shipment turned up yesterday so that's here in less than 7 days from hong kong. No import duties or vat
Printed it tonight, it seems ok

For some reason stuff I order from Far East almost never seems to attract import charges except for high value items, yet anything I order from USA nearly always does even for low value items.

Seems like our preferred trading partner is Far East not USA, I would have thought it would be other way around. Perhaps it is reciprocity due to import tariffs imposed by the USA on UK imports, who knows.

It's because the Chinese fill in the declaration fraudulently to keep the value below the threshold.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

If you need, I can supply you for $15/KG. 1kg for 1 spool.
1.75mm and 3mm, both PLA ok.
New original material, and roundless tolerance is +/-0.02mm.
If you have interests, I can send my factory photo to you for a look.
Davi
liouzhiguang@yahoo.com.cn

and your website is....?

Wonder how much the shipping would be....