I keep running into discussions of how much 3D printer filament costs, which low-cost options are good (or even usable) and how we can get filament more cheaply. . . then I happened to look at the 3Doodler website and saw how much their filament costs. . .
3 mm PLA “strands”, $9.99 for a pack of 25, each 10 inches (25.4 cm) long. That’s 55.7 g of PLA by my calculation, or 17.9 cents/g. . . which is $179 for a 1 kg spool. Ouch!
That’s some impressive substance, at $179/kilo…
But, it’s made of unicorn tears, rainbows, and happiness!
@John_Ridley
I recently wrote an article about my travails with a spool of filament off eBay, in my case it cost $27.99. It printed fine right up until the point where the diameter went up over 2 mm - on the major axis of course, because it was highly elliptical. That was enough to dramatically increase the drag in the Bowden tube, and if a fat section made it through to the J-Head, to jam in the PTFE liner. This happened multiple times as I tried to finish a print. The hotend was never clogged; the filament simply couldn’t get into the hotend. I threw the rest of the spool away last weekend. . .
That’s not to say that good filament should cost $179 a spool, though 