Hello, Im trying to improve my print quality with a new pla fillament, here is what it looks like now

I am really glad to hear from you Thank you

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dc42
Where it gets really complicated is if you live outside the EU but happen to be visiting e.g. the UK, and you want to collect the goods from the supplier and then take them back home with you.

Unless it has changed since I was frequently taking good abroad personally (years ago), it is fairly straightforward if you are carrying the goods with you. You pay the VAT to the supplier in the UK, ensuring you get a VAT receipt. You arrive really early at the airport and take a copy of the VAT receipt to a bod at the customs desk, who will inspect the goods and ensure they match the goods on the receipt and refund the VAT (after finding the right person and filling in some paperwork of course). They don't refund the VAT in cash there and then, but you tell them where to send it and you get it back eventually (usually within 6 months or so).

Importing goods in person is far worse. I recall one occasion after a long & tiring flight I got to customs with a case full of samples, but I had forgotten to carry a pen. I asked the official who had just given me a mountain of forms to fill in whether I could borrow his pen, to which he agreed. He sat and watched me battle for 30 minutes with the forms (you have to look up the category and sub-category numbers for each item in a book), then after I slid the completed forms across the desk in triumph, he pointed to an instruction at the top of the first form and said, "I cannot accept these because they must be filled in in black ink, not blue."

Dave

@DC42
Thanks for this answer. That is why I was so astonished and could not believe the prices. I was not sure how it is regulated in Ireland, but I could not believe that I had not to pay VAT. Otherwise I would only order all things in Ireland. 3DFilaments fixed it already.

After the last reduction I am seriously thinking what to do. At first I have to thank the company for the latest price reduction.
You can order here in my country filament with a low total price. Many people say that this filament is good, some say not. I have two spools here from that company. One is green ABS that I ordered one year ago as I started printing (at this time the price was much higher) and one is HIPS that has the same color. Both are printing very well. But the - how I should say - the layers of the ABS spool are very bad. You have to monitor the print and help the extruder to feed. Sometimes other layers are on top of the actual layer. I hope you can understand what I mean. There is one guy that said that the ABS did not react with Acetone. I cannot test it by myself, because I do not have Acetone here. Besides of them I bought also two spools from another company one year ago that consists of PLA. The black one does print well with no problems. The yellow opaque did not print well at the beginning and did stick badly on the bed. Now after a year and a good working auto-bed leveling it is indeed printable, but I would not buy this anymore.
Then I have tested three weeks ago a new company. I bought only one spool of PLA. What can I say? It prints perfect and the layers come down easily. But in my opinion it is probably at least the same company as my ABS filament even though the available colors are different and there is another labeling.
The new prices for one spool of 3DFilament are now round about 10€ less than these spools, so if I would buy 2 spools i would have roughly the same price. So I really have to think about it, but for the moment I have enough material. If I get my printer fixed soon maybe around in one or two weeks.
Some things I am still missing on their page. A datasheet for example. Of course I could print a little bit of the test filament before the print fails. I do not know yet if the filament was the cause of the printing failure or the printer himself (my cable connection is seriously damaged, I can print, but the heater and/ or the temperature reading of the nozzle fail).
Two make long things short: I prefer to print at low temperature, because opaque filaments stays more transparent if the temperature is as low as possible. So I transferred this to my generally favorite.
The second thing that I am missing is some more photos/ details. I really like the color of the yellow flou filament. But there are two types of fluorescent filament: The first one is transparent/ neutral at light and only shines with the color in darkness and the second one has the color also at light. I am not interested in the first one in this case.

i got a pink fillament as test sample ,but i can only see fluo pink on their site ,but thisone does not glow in the dark :s

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Darathy
i got a pink fillament as test sample ,but i can only see fluo pink on their site ,but thisone does not glow in the dark :s

That is a good point. I did not print this test example yet but as I turned the filament in my hand I got a light blue color, but in the dark it is not shining. There are two possibilities of fluorescence, but I would have charged the filament for one hour or more. Maybe they mean something like neon instead of fluo. That would also fit to the photo of the yellow filament and would fulfill my interests.

Edit: At another site there is written that the fluorescence does not make the filament shining but the color is more intensive. I would call it "neon", but I do not know if this is in English spoken regions familiar.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/12/2015 04:54PM by Treito.

Yes Treito, these are neon colours. Thanks for this notice. Glow in dark colours are different one. We have them in offer, but at the moment out of stock.

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dmould
Unless it has changed since I was frequently taking good abroad personally (years ago), it is fairly straightforward if you are carrying the goods with you. You pay the VAT to the supplier in the UK, ensuring you get a VAT receipt. You arrive really early at the airport and take a copy of the VAT receipt to a bod at the customs desk, who will inspect the goods and ensure they match the goods on the receipt and refund the VAT (after finding the right person and filling in some paperwork of course). They don't refund the VAT in cash there and then, but you tell them where to send it and you get it back eventually (usually within 6 months or so).

That works if you are taking the goods out of the EU for private purposes, but not if you are taking them for business purposes or trade. So if you use this method, make sure the invoice is made out to you personally, not to a business name.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

[www.proto-pasta.com]
always a new exciting experience...

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Ormerod 187
Firmware Electronics: Duet 0.6
Firmware Version:1.18.1 (2017-04-07)
Web Interface Version:1.15a
Slic3r 1.2.9a and Simplify3D 4.0.0
[www.dropbox.com]

Quote
Darathy
i got a pink fillament as test sample ,but i can only see fluo pink on their site ,but thisone does not glow in the dark :s

The word "fluorescent" does not mean "luminescent" (glow-in-the-dark). Fluorescent means that it absorbs light of one wavelength and emits it at a different (usually longer) wavelength. In this case it will absorb ultraviolet and emit visible light, thus making the object appear brighter than normal under UV rich light such as daylight because you are seeing not only the reflected visible light but also a percentage of the normally invisible UV part of the spectrum. Take your printed object outdoors and you should notice that it looks unnaturally bright in Sunlight.

As a sidenote, many washing powders have a fluorescent additive in order to make clothes "whiter than white". White fabrics tend to turn yellow with age, which makes them appear unsightly. To counter this people used to routinely use "laundry blue" (e.g. "Reckitt's blue" which is still sold) to impart a slight blue colouration as a temporary dye, and as blue is the compliment of yellow it cancels out yellow. While it got rid of the yellow tint, it made the cloth darker - white clothes were grey in comparison to new material (light yellow paint plus light blue paint = grey paint). Then someone had the (literally) bright idea of using a fluorescent chemical that down-converts UV into blue light so that the yellow was cancelled without any darkening effect. It is now also used in some toothpastes to cancel the appearance of yellowing teeth, where it is referred to as a "brightening agent".

Go to a nightclub that has "black lights" and you will easily pick out the patrons that have used such toothpaste - and the people wearing white shirts will give away the type of washing powder that was last used on them. Print out a few items in that fluorescent filament to take with you!

Dave

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/13/2015 03:00PM by dmould.

Many thanks for this great explanation. I knew that blue particles are used to whiten clothes but not that this has something to do with flourescence. Nethertheless according to the pictures it seems that the green fluo glows in the dark. Even though I have roughly 6 spools of filament here (most of them are used), I ordered another 3 spools. I am really interested in this yellow fluo spool and buying only two spools would not have any real advantage for me. Tomorrow I first have to repair my Ormerod and then I have to think about what I can print. I am afraid that it will take 5 years to consume this among of filament.

If it glows in the dark when no UV light is present, then it ought to be described as phosphorescent, not fluorescent.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

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dc42
If it glows in the dark when no UV light is present, then it ought to be described as phosphorescent, not fluorescent.

Yes, that's the word I should have used instead of "luminescent" - it is related to fluorescence, but instead of absorbing light and re-emitting it at a different wavelength immediately, the reaction is delayed and the absorbed light is emitted after a delay, thus after exposure to bright light it will glow in the dark for a while. A luminescent material on the other hand emits light as a result of a cold chemical process (e.g. glowsticks) or a radioactive process (e.g. the radium luminous watch dials and aircraft instrument panels that used to be in common use but now banned for health reasons). A luminescent object will thus glow without prior exposure to light while a phosphoescent material needs to be exposed to light before it will glow.

I have tried a few of the phosphorescent filaments. They work, but the ones I tried do not glow all that brightly after exposure to light, though it would be enough to locate the printed object in complete darkness (you might for example print a lightswitch cover in the material).

I can recommend the green and red fluorescent filaments, which I have used to print my quadcopter arms so that it is more easily visible in the sky. I was not quite so impressed by the yellow or blue fluorescent filaments, but YMMV (and I have only tried the ABS varieties, not the PLA versions).

(You can see photos of my most recent quad design here [www.thingiverse.com] )

Dave

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Treito
....There is one guy that said that the ABS did not react with Acetone. I cannot test it by myself, because I do not have Acetone here...

That is not right, you can dissolve ABS in Acetone, PLA not (trust me, I tried for weeks to make ABS slurry out of PLA bits :-))

Erik

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ormerod168

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Treito
....There is one guy that said that the ABS did not react with Acetone. I cannot test it by myself, because I do not have Acetone here...

That is not right, you can dissolve ABS in Acetone, PLA not (trust me, I tried for weeks to make ABS slurry out of PLA bits :-))

Erik

Erik, I know. But what this guy wanted to say that the Filament sold as ABS maybe is not ABS. I was able to print this type of ABS better than PLA. ABS even did stick on glass (I really was astonished). Maybe this guy is right and the ABS is not ABS or ABS mixed with something else.

I came across another filament supplier

[www.filamentshop.ie]

I gave them a try to see what their filament was like and have to report I was pleasantly surprised

The only down side some may find with the filament is it comes in loose coils not on a reel but I didnt find that a problem
They sell it in units of 100gms @ 2.70 euros ( about £1.95) per 100gms and you can buy as little or as much as you like
if you order multiples of one colour they send it as one piece not lots of 100gm pieces
best of all if you order 1600gms or more they deliver it free by UPS
I ordered...
200 clear
200 dark blue
200 light blue
200 green
300 magenta
300 marigold
300 pink

a total of 1.7Kg which qualified me for free UPS delivery and an all up cost of 45.90 Euros ( £33.24)
that works out at £19.55 per KG

It arrived this morning and I gave it a try .
I ran it through with a first layer hot end 210 and bed at 65 and following layers at 200 and 57
It stuck great to my kapton bed and gave lovely results , The colours are very bright ,
I printed the attached file so you could see the colours
I dont have any link to the shop other than as a very happy customer

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/15/2015 12:00PM by Don Recardo.