Brittle Filament

Hello All,

I am having fun here trying to break my Nimble. Trying out all sorts of filaments. Using a Volcano and pumping vast quantities of filament through it. Now going back to testing the more tricky ones.

In that vein, what is the most brittle filament you know? I am now testing with Laywood, Olive. It seems pretty brittle to me. Easy to snap.
Any other "difficult" filaments?

Thanks

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Lykle
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Co-creator of the Zesty Nimble, worlds lightest Direct Drive extruder.
[zesty.tech]

PLA that's absorbed moisture from the air is the most brittle filament I've run into.

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Ultra MegaMax Dominator 3D printer: [drmrehorst.blogspot.com]

Yes, 3mm PLA can be a pain in the proverbial, especially the translucent colours for some reason. If a print finishes over night I often find the filament has snapped about an inch above the direct extruder in the morning. Similarly, when setting up after not having used a roll of pla for a while (since I mostly use abs) it's not unusual for the first couple of inches of filament to snap. It doesn't seem to like having been warm.

Great thanks!

I will leave the PLA out for tonight and test it tomorrow.
I think I still have a piece somewhere.

I ran out of filament and shipping to this island takes a while. Been testing too much I think. Didn't catch it in time that I was running out.

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Lykle
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Co-creator of the Zesty Nimble, worlds lightest Direct Drive extruder.
[zesty.tech]

Hi Lykle, nimble looks nice. Are you open-sourcing the design? I'm tempted to try something like that for my next build. Did you run into any problems with twist in the drive shaft (from print head movement) imparting unwanted movement to the extruder? I assume you're using a worm gear drive, so the reduction may be sufficient to make the worst case shaft twist (about 180 degrees?) insignificant in terms of extruder movement. Maybe the worst case could be more like 90 degrees if I mount the motor at a corner of the XY plane.

Hi JamesK

Shall we move this discussion to a separate thread?

Lykle

Certainly if you prefer, and I can see that having a discussion of nimble in it's own thread might be helpful

I think I've hit a problem with trying it out though, I have just under 800mm of travel in my X axis, and it seems like getting drive shaft in sufficient length is quite difficult! I'd estimate I need something around 1.2 to 1.5m to cover that comfortably.