3d Printers South Africa

Have to say that I am not a fan of Creality Ender PLA (bought the "value pake" some time ago). I need to dry the spools each time if I want a acceptable print from it. I have other cheap brands like Buildvolume and Kingroon that can sit outside for ages and they never give me issues.
 
Park@82 said:
Have to say that I am not a fan of Creality Ender PLA (bought the "value pake" some time ago). I need to dry the spools each time if I want a acceptable print from it. I have other cheap brands like Buildvolume and Kingroon that can sit outside for ages and they never give me issues.
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Strange, I've used the value pack filaments on smaller projects and they are fine for me, never had any need to dry them really. Maybe I just don't let them sit long enough to build up moisture as my printers really work for their money :laugh:
 
R4ziel said:
Strange, I've used the value pack filaments on smaller projects and they are fine for me, never had any need to dry them really. Maybe I just don't let them sit long enough to build up moisture as my printers really work for their money
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Maybe I just got a bad batch. But I tried to print something last night, the white creality roll stated stringing immediately. The print came out looking terrible. I switched to another brand and the same file printed fine. It was just a simple model with some embossed text at the top of it.
 
I grabbed one of those black and white Creality Ender value packs with the white and black (R278 per roll, from Takealot nogal, so not too bad). I also added an SA filament (Brown) roll.

I'm too cheapskate to try the wood grain filament stuff yet, R700 a roll for wood PLA is a bit much.
Will be interesting to see how the SA Filament performs.

It's been interesting to see how much stuff you can print with one roll. If you're just printing things like brackets, cases, speaker stands, key holders etc. you can print a sh**ton of things. Very cool.

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If the brown SA Filament looks k@k I'll just print some, well, k@k...

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Installed Orca slicer again for the calibration prints. Needed to dial in material temp. Comes with a nice amount of different calibration tools.

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saor said:
Installed Orca slicer again for the calibration prints. Needed to dial in material temp. Comes with a nice amount of different calibration tools.

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This new bump mesh tool looks awesome.
I'm definitely going to be taking a textured print for a spin over the weekend.

bumpmesh.com

BumpMesh by CNC Kitchen

Add displacement textures to STL, OBJ, and 3MF models directly in your browser. Preview, mask, bake, and export printable textured meshes locally.
bumpmesh.com bumpmesh.com

Mesh graffiti is also something I'll be giving spin at some point.


I love how simple many of the designs on makerworld are.
There is nothing more, or less I wanted from a simple phone desk clamp bracket that fits in with my existing desk headphone holders. Finding something like this out there, even if there was one, would have taken ages of messing around on e-commerce sits and more than likely would not have been worth the effort.

What a cool tool to have. Now it's time to chill with some beers, watch more stuff print and also, quite literally watch paint desiccant dry in the oven.

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It's cool to experience the desiccant drying process in person.

I knew if orange desiccant gets green or black, it's used up... but a part of my brain didn't believe it'll just turn perfect orange again when you dry it. I can even use this stuff now for my cat's automatic pet feeder, I actually researched alternative options and never found something, until re-usable desiccant came up as part of the 3D printing scene.

Mine was all pitch black.

1 hour into drying (~100 degrees Celsius in oven):

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2 hours, and we're done:

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Someone even took the time to design a nice little desiccant filler funnel, yet another thing I was digging around for before realizing, "yo, dumbass, you can just print it":

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EDIT:
Holy balls.
Another unexpected little detail, I didn't think replacing the desiccant on the AMS Lite was going to make a big difference when looking at the outside vs. inside humidity values on the the little sensor gadgetmajigjig.... (the filament "boxes" don't have proper seals).. but I was wrong, 8% difference in less than an hour.

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Apologies if I'm talking to myself here and boring the f**k our of the old school 3D printer guys, but there's a lot if little details I've had questions about since the beginning and they're either hard to find direct answers to on the internet, or people just skimp over them. I like the little details, it makes the whole process feel like you're constantly learning something.
 
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RaptorSA said:
I grabbed one of those black and white Creality Ender value packs with the white and black (R278 per roll, from Takealot nogal, so not too bad).
]
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Those are the same ones that I'm having stringing /moisture issues with. Would be interesting to hear if you get the same issue. I never needed to dry my pla before but these need drying on my experience.
 
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Park@82 said:
Those are the same ones that I'm having stringing /moisture issues with. Would be instreating to hear if you get the same issue. I never needed to dry my pla before but these need drying on my experience.
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I haven't used the grey filament in a few days and it's been humid as balls. In fact, when I bought these filament rolls I ran in the rain with the rolls in bag just before installing them (grey and black)

I'm doing a print now using gray, and as you can see it get stringing....
Whether this is expected or bad, I have no idea, I just don't have the experience.
(as you can see form previous posts my desiccant was utterly useless too)

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Personally, until told otherwise and given the circumstances in the past week, I don't really care about a few spiderwebs.
I was going to buy myself a dryer, but this is the highveld, so chances are our dry winters will make this problem go away by itself (I don't know, another thing to find out)... I'm just going to keep going and decide later.
 
_Jakes_ said:
What are you building?
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Drum machine / step sequencer. Been wanting something I can trigger drum samples with when jamming... which then escalated to include a step sequencer with midi sync. I'll maybe post the build process in a new thread.
 
RaptorSA said:
Dirt cheap.
Worth giving it a try, even if it's just for future large prints like storage solutions where quality doesn't matter, thanks!

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Ive been using them since last year. I'm generally very happy with the Kingroon stuff that they sell for the price... They are all the way in White River and they always courier to Pudo lockers so check that you have a Pudo locker close to you beforehand.
 
RaptorSA said:
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I'm too cheapskate to try the wood grain filament stuff yet, R700 a roll for wood PLA is a bit much.
Will be interesting to see how the SA Filament performs.
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If you ever want to print the wood filled ones make sure you get a hardened steel and bigger than .4 size nozzle. Some contain real wood particles that can clog and they are abrasive.... the default one on the A1 is stainless steel .4. You should be able to get hardened steel ones from Buildvolume.
 
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