LOL OMG its so cute!!! I ordered a 1lbs. spool of Alloy 910 off Amazon, came on this tiny spool!
I love/hate it! Love that it’s so darn cute, and that I can use the spool for many things after the filament is off it. Hate that with a bowden the tighter the coil of the filament the worse the friction becomes. Often the last bit of tightly coiled filament from a normal size spool is hard for my non direct drive printers.
First thing is to make a setup to transfer this filament to a larger spool and let it sit in a bin with desiccant for a day or two to try and ease the coil from tight winding and expand the radius of the coils. I would prefer a large as possible diameter on the hub of spools to make feeding easier. It does twist as it is pulled through an extruder, if you look at the path of the tooth marks they will spiral around the filament over about 1.5’-2’ of extrusion. This length shortens as the coil becomes tighter towards the inside of a spools winding as the diameter the filament is wrapped around becomes narrower. Its an easily remedied issue with some consideration when choosing spool hub diameter. Hope it is taken into account eventually.
I suspect this spool will become part of a filament guide or respooling mechanism to transfer to large diameter hubs. I am not sure I can ease the coil and increase radius but I need to try given the issue of pushing a curved object through straight (or at least less curved) bowden tube. Its far from ideal and I can feel less friction in a bowden that matches the coil versus one that is shorter but straighter and forces the filament into a straighter path than it likes or remembers. But the longer one then makes retraction huge to make up for the slack. A conundrum due to the coil of the filament.
@Steven_Critchfield good suggestion. Something around 50c for maybe 3-4 inches of filament feed path, radiant softening and straightening. It might be too much hassle, but it’s a possible next project after the multi material pivoting short bowden extruders setup I am doing now.
We will update Alloy 910 1lb spools to standard hub/dia next month. Empty spools are on their way to us now. After 41,974,298 comments from users, seemed like a good idea : )
Nylon is so slippery and flexible that I doubt any residual coiling bend would cause meaningful feeding problems. Definitely an issue with stiffer, draggy filaments like PLA though.
+1 on it not being a problem. Nylon is both slippery and super flexible – so you can leave it on its spool – it’s a non-problem.
The biggest problem with the spool is that I find the nylon entirely fills the spool when it’s new, so if you mount your spools sideways you have to be very careful that the nylon doesn’t fall off the bottom of the spool and wrap around the spool mount’s axle. Once you’ve used some it’s no longer a problem.
@Mark_Wheadon I do not doubt you! It’s my first time with it. It’s raining so I am not opening the vacuum seal until the weather clears up, I have other things to print in cheap PLA that is already open for a month and needs to be used up anyway. I was thinking of respooling the 910 onto an old Atomic spool as they have the widest hub, but won’t bother until I check it out per your advice.
At work ive got a spool of 910 which is 3 month old and was always open. Some do exxagerate a lot. Yes from time to time youll need to bake it but it wont go bad after 2 days…
I will be curious to see how well this prints. Also suggestion to save money on desicant, use the stuff that you use to dry flowers. It is real cheap, reusable like the stuff prebagged. Like $20 for 5lbs. That will keep a lot of filament dry in sealed containers.
So far so good no issues from the filament twist. Felt pretty smooth starting out, still worried about the super tight inner coils but it does seem very slippery compared to PLA PETG or ABS. hopefully the strength will help it not get eaten by the extruder as well. first calibration was going so well I stopped it to print a real part. Will post results images it’s a good test. Reasonably complicated stepper pivot mount with lots of through holes, smaller overhangs and bridges for nut capture slots, some retraction that will force stringing to show itself.
Another data point: PLA etc. is extruded and then does its final cooling on the spool, which is why it’s so wedded to the spool’s shape. Taulman’s nylon is stretched under water until it’s the correct diameter and then spooled, so I suspect it doesn’t have the curve wired into its making.
That is good to know, I am aware of how filaments fibers and yarns are made from a class on textiles and manufacturing in college so I can understand that process a bit. It was discussed in class briefly in relation to manufacturing nylon fibers for woven fabrics. I was not aware of PLA cooling on the spool but it explains a lot about the coil, inner coils are going to be tighter but also annealed to the coil more from slower cooling.
It went very well. there was much stringing from lack of tuning the heat and retraction, but this is a great result for the small posts on the corner of these screw holes. very good details and crazy strong compared to PLA. First print was unusable due to lifting on the base, not the filaments fault I had the wrong print surface on the bed. So I tried to test its strength. My hands hurt actually quite badly and the part was not breaking or delaminating, and I stopped realizing the amount of force I was loading would cause me injury when and if it actually broke the part. Same part I could rip up by hand in PLA or PETG, not easily but not loading up so much pressure I am worried of the resulting ‘pressure drop’ and hurting myself. Seriously strong stuff this Alloy 910. I doubt retraction will be an issue, its so strong it doesn’t allow the drive gear to carve into it and slices snap or scrap off causing a filament grind through, the slivers between the teeth cuts on the filament are not going anywhere, not snapping off and causing a divot, they are strong enough to keep pulling the filament through so it’s a non issue I suspect as long as the motor doesn’t skip. missing/deleted image from Google+
