I was recently asked to make 500 whistles for a local college to sell.

3D Printing
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1

I was recently asked to make 500 whistles for a local college to sell. My concern is the safety of the plastic. I always print with Toner Plastics PLA and would like to stick with it if possible but I don’t want any issues with illess. Any suggestions or can I stay with PLA?

2

PLA is a bioplastic, I can’t see any reason to think it would be toxic.

3

Unless your literally eating out of it it should be fine. I think brass nozzles contain a bit of lead so e3d sells stainless steel ones to be more food safe, but you shouldn’t need them for whistles.

I play with molten lead all the time and I’m fine. Come to think of it I should start wearing gloves and masks.

4

Virgin PLA is food-safe and biocompatible. But the pigments and additives typically are not. (No filament is virgin PLA, even natural PLA has melt modifier additives.) Of all the pigmented options, white and black are usually the safest, because white typically uses titanium dioxide and black usually uses carbon black, and both of those are perfectly safe pigments for food contact use. You still don’t know what the additives are, but you never will.

Taulman nylon 910 is probably the only option that could be considered for medical applications. It’s not just about leaching chemicals, there’s also bacterial growth in the layer boundaries. The FDM part structure is extremely favorable for bacteria to hide out and multiply. 910 can be autoclaved for sterilizing.

But honestly, you’re talking about a whistle, not a surgical device or coffee cup. Infant teething toys are made out of ABS, it’s perfectly safe. Just use a reputable filament vendor who sells non-recycled material and any filament is perfectly reasonable for casual skin/mouth contact. Nothing bad is going to happen. (FYI, black is the most common color for recycled contaminants.)

5

Thanks guys!!! I think you all have reassured me for using PLA. Toner Plastics is a US filament supplier so I think it’s gonna be as good as it gets in my opinion. I will be using red as the color so it should be ok. I’ve made many whistles but not 500 so I just wanted to check.

6

Could you give an idea into your manufacturing plan? How many whistles per print, and how long it would take to print the 500? It sounds a lot to me, but I’m not a printer myself. Did you already build some prototypes to test?

7

T-glase is also food safe before it goes through the extruder. And prints pretty nicely.

8

Call the filament manufacturer. Talk to them about your project.