The testing: Sakata3D

Oddly I found a samplekit from Sakata3D laying around. Why not start our testing series with this material?

The filament is a flexible Biodegradable polyester combined with PLA.

See specifications here:

The print settings were a bit alarming, that low temperatures? really?

Initial tests with a Replicator 2X (all metal hot-end) showed some issues just extruding. After a temperature adjustment (higher) there were still issues when retracting. The edges/sides are really good. I increased flow a bit as well to fill better. Still issues with retraction.

I see good potential. But the mix is a bit difficult to draw conclusions from when it comes to behavior of the extruded filament.

The recommended temperatures seems to be way of as well. 155-160C is completely wrong (at least in my tests). I’m close to 175-185C with R2X and that works more smoothly, even at just 24mm/s

Finally i adjusted the starting points to avoid missing placing material on a solid previous layer. It really comes down to retraction, but I didn’t have enough filament to fine-tune that. So, I changed the starting points from “Optimize start points for fastest printing” to “Use Random start points for all perimiters” instead.

The best (but far from perfect) settings i found for our Makerbot R2X (Simplify3D) were the following:

Next machine; Flashforge Dreamer

Moving on the the next machine, FlashForge dreamer, which I had much better expectations for since it has PLA-cooling.

First attempt was a bit tricky. Loads of under extrusion. It’s as if it were around 50% extrusion multiplier or something… I suspect the PLA-cooling was to strong. Next attempt with some hotter extruder (210C), instead of lowering the fan-speed.

That worked good and I got an almost perfect profile on the second attempt. After that I run out of the samples…

Settings for Flashforge Dreamer here: