PEEK filament, finally! The first in a line of "E3D Experimental" extreme materials that

PEEK filament, finally! The first in a line of “E3D Experimental” extreme materials that we want to make available for people to play with. When we say this is experimental, we really mean it. You can’t spell “experimental” without the word “mental”. There’s more to come on the absurd materials front, so watch this space.

http://e3d-online.com/Filament/By-Brand/E3D-Everyday/PEEK-1.75mm-Natural?sort=p.price&order=DESC

We’ve also introduced what we are calling “E3D Premium”, which are a range of selected materials that aren’t experimental and are well tested, but have exceptional printing properties. We’ve got our own awesome PC-ABS blend at what I think is an awesome price-point of £17.50, it’s like ABS on crack - much stronger, stiffer, springier, better layer adhesion, and amazing bridges. http://e3d-online.com/Filament/By-Brand/E3D-Everyday/PCABS-1.75mm-White

We’ve also introduced a Nylon 12 (PA12) material. This stuff is completely different from the Taulman Nylon materials. Whereas the taulman products are quite soft and flexible much like a nylon cable tie, our PA12 is much stiffer. It is more comparable to a rigid PLA or PET type material. So you get the amazing layer adhesion of Nylon, but with great stiffness. It’s much more demanding to print than something like Taulman Bridge (Which is awesome awesome stuff), requiring higher temperatures and usually rafts to keep things held down.

I’ll do a blog post soon about our new materials range, and get some example prints, images, and technical info out there for you guys.

Great news! Really interested in trying some of this out! A few questions:

  1. Is that a decimal point error on the price or is it just that experimental!?

  2. When are you getting 3mm Tritan back in stock? Been holding off on ordering for ages waiting for that!

  3. How is PC-ABS for warp and larger prints compared to standard ABS? (great price BTW!)

  4. The ‘request desktop site’ button in Android chrome doesn’t work on your site and there’s no link for the full site either, is that fixable?

One material I want to see more of is hips. It could make a nice dissolvable support material

@Liam_Jackson It sounds like you might not be familiar with PEEK, or small batch polymer extrusion. That’s actually an incredibly good price for a short run of a very expensive and difficult to extrude polymer.

@Tim_Elmore1 good to know :slight_smile: It’s just obviously very different to the price of other filament. Great to see more choice though!

@Liam_Jackson Yeah, it sucks how expensive it is, as @Tim_Elmore1 says, it’s because PEEK is a super expensive raw material to start with, and then you have to have highly specialised extrusion equipment before you can even think about turning it into filament. There’s also the rather annoying fact with small batch extrusion that you might start with a 28kg bag of PEEK, but you’ll be lucky to get more than 20kg of filament out of the machine after you’ve flushed the old resin out, settled the machine into steady state extrusion and with what ends up left inside the machine. If you were doing huge amounts, your yield would obviously increase, but the demand for PEEK is not really high enough to justify a large run.

@Sanjay_Mortimer1 ah yeah that sucks but makes perfect sense. Thanks for replying!

@Liam_Jackson Tritan is having some manufacturing issues, it’s quite a tricky material to extrude I understand. We’ve had a large amount on order for some time, but are waiting on it to come in the door. Sadly this might be a months-scale delay rather than a days-scale delay.

PC-ABS warps more than ABS, you want as much heat on the bed as you can get, warm ambient temps, and maybe a raft for very demanding objects. It’s by no means a nightmare, and is completely manageable for almost all objects, it just needs a bit more heat all round. Our PC-ABS warps less than the proto-pasta stuff in my experience, but this is because ours has a touch less PC in it than the proto-pasta stuff. Not going to lie, the proto-pasta stuff is a higher end material than ours, and I love it to bits. Our goals with our own branded stuff was to make it a bit easier for most people to deal with, both on the ease of use side, and on the wallet. PC-ABS is such a widely used industrial engineering plastic, and it prints gloriously well, I don’t see why it should be considered a rare-freak material when it comes to 3D printing.

Thanks for the heads up on the website/mobile front, I’ll tag in @Joshua_Rowley on this and he might be able to sort things out for you.