Hello,

I am quite new to 3d printing and would like to know where you get your filament from in new zealand. E.g. do you get it from jaycar(expensive) , diamond age (very vey expensive), or di you just get a filastruder? I woukd like to know.

Thanks,
Beeep22

Trade me is your friend.Hobbyist has pla for $38.90,though a limited colour range.
Depending on your location,shipping may be around $10.
Places like Noel leeming etc. see 3d filament as a cash cow,with pricing to match.

Just be warned, cheap filament can turn out to be expensive and frustrating. Diamond Age is far more reasonably priced per kg with their 3mm filament than their 1.75mm. This price difference steered me towards building my printer to use 3mm. So far I have used several spools of Diamond Age PLA plus a reel of ABS as well as Ninjaflex (from Fenner Drives) - all with excellent results. My son and I then built up another 3D printer for him, that uses 1.75mm filament bowden fed. We bought a small quantity of 1.75mm filament from Diamond Age to get it up and running and then bought a 1 kg spool cheap off trademe. The Diamond Age filament extruded reliably but we had no end of trouble with blockages with the Hobbyist stuff. It was un-coloured filament so should not have been full of junk to colour it. It turned out that the filament was closer to 2mm than 1.75mm and was just too tight to slide freely in the 2mm ID teflon tube. Maybe with a geared extruder drive or a direct drive (non-bowden) extruder it would be OK, but it was un-usable with an ungeared extruder drive pushing it thru a bowden tube. That filament won't be used till I make an extruder to push it thru my 3D printer.

I often tell aspiring 3D printing newbies: "If your life doesn't have enough frustration in it at the moment - then maybe 3D printing is for you." There are plenty of things that can go wrong with 3D printing. If you can eliminate bad filament at the start, you will be able to exercise your frustrations on some of the other hurdles. If you really must buy the cheapest, then you should at least beg, borrow or steal a small quantity of quality filament too so you can compare if things don't work as expected.

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My Prusa Mendel i2 inspired Repstrap with welded steel frame: [youtu.be]
And my Smartrap derived Briefcase 3D printer: [youtu.be]

I agree with n.glasson totally, I have been using Diamond Age fillaments in both PLA and ABS, in 3mm and 1.75 for a few years and they are very consistent in size and totally reliable. Now that I am so used to them I would be reluctant to change.

I tried Verbatim ABS Black from RS-Online and found the diameter was consistent between 1.72-1.75 but had issues with it curling up on every print. I tried the same Verbatim filament on an UP printer at work and it printed perfectly so I figure my printer settings are the issue.
FWIW - the last batch from Diamond Age was 1.68-1.72.

Interestingly I switched to DiamondAge "glow in the dark" ABS that has been sitting on my shelve for months and it printed fine on my printer. Perhaps the UP printer which is tiny (150x150) and very automated with limited "tweakability" and prints sloooow is the key to it's success. Lock in known parameters that work and don't allow users to change them. Now what would be the fun in that

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/14/2014 04:51PM by AgentX.

3mm filament: most places but not our local Diamondage. They use 2.85mm.
1.75mm. Good pricing most places, but buy it from diamond age and you pay almost as much for length as for their 2.85mm filament!
1.75mm filament is available from lots and lots of places in all sorts and colours of plastics.

Advantages of 1.75/2.85/3mm filaments:
higher diameter= slightly better volumetric extrusion accuracy for the same filament diameter thickness deviations.
Smaller diameter: much easier to feed as less cross sectional area to push through hot end, shouldn't need a geared stepper motor.

Gearing stepper motors for extruders: generally a bad thing, backlash source, slows retract moves as the steper motor has to rotate further for the same distance as a non geared retract stepper. However... if you can get a low mass, fast stepper to work on your print head (instead of pushing through a bowden) then it's great for retracts and also flexible filaments.

I'm currently using all OMC-stepper on line motors which are great prices and range, I've upgraded from $20 per piece NZ available weak 200 step motors to long 2.7V? 400 step motors with better print resolution and unbelievable speed off 12 volts, way more speed than I can use and they run cool with my conservative potentiometer settings on a RAMP board.

I'll be upgrading soon from my geared extruder, probably with a birdstruder(quick release) and another of my long nema17 400 step motors as above.
I would like to experiment with a 6V nema 8 stepper for extruding, but without a durable worm drive reduction I can't quite see how to get the stepper fitting tidly on top of a rostock effector. A 6v Nema 8 should react pretty quickly for retracts due to it's low rotor mass and diameter, also I should be able to run it reasonably fast to take advantage of it's available power to weight ratio- typically non geared steppers are moving much much slower than they are capable of.

I'm experimenting with a geeetech thermal break from dx.com and a home made water cooled holder at the moment, but I'm finding that the filament forms a fatter plug under pressure and jams inside the thermal break, dissappointing because their thermal break looked good, it has a teflon liner for much of it's length. Must be drilled out excessively wide somewhere though!

It's important for hot ends to be only just greater diameter than the filament for rapid heat transfer, otherwise a plug will form under pressure and start jams.

I use a small cloth piece with a drop or two of vegetable oil clothes-pegged around the filament before my bowden drive for most of my PLA prints. Seems to have no obvious impact on strength, however with glow in the dark green from diamond age, I've had oily drips right on the initial layer, apparently "a small amount of kerosine" is used in it's manufacture.

Layer bonding strength is impacted hugely by accurate calibration of extrusion and by setting of nozzle width in your slicing SW. I get much better layer bonding strength if I set the nozzle thickness higher than it actually is to force filament to flow sideways as well as simply being tracked behind the nozzle.

I've bought filament from matterhackers(USA, sub week lead time), dx.com(hong kong, free freight, about 3 weeks lead time and diamondage(usually overnight courier). For impact resistant structural items I'm currently looking to print nylon though I have about 4.5 Kg of ABS pellets I'm building an extruder for.