Filament suppliers in the USA to avoid?

I've ordered my first 3D printer, a Reprappro Mendel, last week and I'm looking at the different filament suppliers available in the USA. Mostly, I've been going off the list of suppliers on the reprap wiki site:

[www.reprap.org]

There are several within the US, and I'm having trouble differentiating between a quality supplier from a supplier to be avoided. Does anyone have any buyer tips that they can share in finding a good supplier? What sort of pitfalls should I try to avoid? Any personal experiences they'd be willing to give?

I'll be using 1.75mm filament, probably PLA, but I'm willing to experiment with ABS as well.

Ultimachine. Great quality filament.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/03/2012 03:55PM by akhlut.

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- akhlut

Just remember - Iterate, Iterate, Iterate!

[myhomelessmind.blogspot.com]

It's a little hard to figure out who to avoid. Generally the best suppliers are Ultimachine, Protoparadigm, Makerbot, Makergear. They have the best, most consistent reputations. The others, mostly on Amazon, also can be good, but are a little more inconsistent. You hear both positive and negative reviews, and it often varies depending on color.

The most problematic color is usually black. If you are looking for black filament, it is best to stick with the suppliers above.

Based on my sample size of 1 order, I've been very happy with New Image Plastics. Tricky ordering, a wait list, and you have to order at least 10 pounds, but great prices and quality stuff as far as I can tell.

Don't forget [shop.printbl.com] . Some of the best PLA available, imported from [diamondage.co.nz] in New Zealand.

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+1 on New Image Plastics. They're the cheapest supplier in the USA that I know of. Definitely worth ordering from them.

I've ordered from both Ultimachine and 3DInk and have nothing but praise for both of them.

brnrd Wrote:
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> +1 on New Image Plastics. They're the cheapest
> supplier in the USA that I know of. Definitely
> worth ordering from them.

Being as how their website doesn't give specifics, perhaps you could give a ballpark of what 10lbs costs including shipping from New Image?

NIP is good at responding to e-mail and phone calls. Less than a month ago, it was $7.95 per lb with a minimum of 10 lbs in natural, black, or white. If you order 10 lbs of the same color, then it comes in a spool. For red, orange, yellow, green, blue, glow in the dark fluorescent green and orange, it was $8.95 per lb.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/04/2012 12:23PM by brnrd.

this is amusing, the title of the thread is "Filament suppliers in the USA to avoid?" and so far everyone has raved over quality filament lol ,

here's one to avoid "repraper.com" and "china best" - either lumpy or loaded with air bubbles or too much moisture or changes diameter from 1.75 to 2.25 or 1.75 to 1 (no joke) or it's a weird grade and not really abs i'm convinced their abs is actually a mix of hdpe and abs or abs and scraps of pla (i'm sure it changes during a spool) repraper abs seems to have a really high contraction rate so if you're printing objects larger than 40x40 it'll lift right off the table, it won't matter what your build surface is, the pla i think might be a bit different, i'll know after the weekend when i print with some,

It's a fair point that no one has talked about issues with suppliers.

I ordered some 3mm abs from Jagprint on Amazon and the product that arrived was very oval shaped. It was difficult to print with, extruded inconsistently, and stripped all the time.

I did contact the seller and they offered to replace it, but I had already used a large portion of it trying to make it print well.

I've been buying 3mm ABS from Makerfarm, and have been happy with both the quality of the filament and their prompt shipping, etc.

If you don't see it on the website, send them an email, they may have more in stock than listed.

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Thingiverse ID Alan1279

here's one of the many many many lumps found in the repraper.com filament:
sample

Thaks for posting everyone! It looks like there are a lot of reliable suppliers out there. I did find one guide for buying 3D printer filament:

[www.protoparadigm.com]

However, one thing the article is saying to look for is the grade of the plastic being sold, where ABS should be PA-747, and PLA should be 4043D. With one exception none of the suppliers recommended in this thread seem to be posting the grade of their filaments. The one exception is Protoparadigm, which posted the article in the first place. Knowing that I'm using a good grade of plastic makes sense, so I'm not sure if I can just dismiss this as a supplier promoting their own product.

Are there a large number of filament grades that are pretty close to each other so I don't really need to worry about this, or is it important to make sure I'm buying the correct grade of filament? Are the other suppliers such as Ulitmachine and Makerbot publishing their filament grades and I'm just missing it?

Don't know about ABS and others but ultimachine advertises their PLA as 4043D too.

What does PA-747 mean? If you're going to be demanding it, then you better know what it really means. I searched by google and I can't find any explanation of what it means.

@brnrd - PA-747 ABS is the grade of plastic used in the filament, and relates to physical properties of the plastic like the flexability, viscosity when melted, melt temperature, etc. The actual datasheet from the plastic manufacturer CHI MEI is here: [catalog.ides.com]

If the plastic is being resold for 3D printer purposes, I would certainly like to know if it still matches the performance published by the original manufacturer.

miso Wrote:
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> Don't know about ABS and others but ultimachine
> advertises their PLA as 4043D too.

Ultimachine even tell you their plastic supplier as well as the grade on the descriptions page Natureworks.

PeteD Wrote:
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> @brnrd - PA-747 ABS is the grade of plastic used
> in the filament, and relates to physical
> properties of the plastic like the flexability,
> viscosity when melted, melt temperature, etc. The
> actual datasheet from the plastic manufacturer CHI
> MEI is here:
> [catalog.ides.com]
> &E=15890
>
> If the plastic is being resold for 3D printer
> purposes, I would certainly like to know if it
> still matches the performance published by the
> original manufacturer.

Is it a grade or a product number? If you look at note 1 that appliers to all properties in the sheet, it states, "Typical properties: these are not to be construed as specifications." This means that making sure you buy this will not guarantee that your print parameters will not change. You may still need to adjust things like your nozzle temperature to when you change feed. Anyway, since there's variation in temperature reading from the actual melt zone because of temperature gradient and thermistor calibration, you may not get good results at the nominal temperature (230C) even if all feed are identical.

thejollygrimreaper Wrote:
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> here's one of the many many many lumps found in
> the repraper.com filament:
> sample
That lump looks like a tumor, sheesh. :/

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Twitchy Wrote:
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> It's a fair point that no one has talked about
> issues with suppliers.
>
> I ordered some 3mm abs from Jagprint on Amazon and
> the product that arrived was very oval shaped. It
> was difficult to print with, extruded
> inconsistently, and stripped all the time.
>
> I did contact the seller and they offered to
> replace it, but I had already used a large portion
> of it trying to make it print well.

The first ABS I ever bought (this past Thanksgiving) was a kg of 3mm red Jagprint. Had the same issues. I then ordered some orange and silver from Ultimaker and the difference was night and day, great stuff. I just got some blue and white from PrintrBot the other day. I only had a chance to print a few blue things. So far so good ( a few bubbles).

The Jagprint material has been working OK for me: round material with consistent diameter. Fed nicely with low warp and good prints. The first order had two spools which were broken in transit and they sent me two free replacement spools for free, let me keep the original material to boot. The next shipment had better spools.