Wat is the best material to print a Extruder?  PLA or ABS

3D Printing
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Wat is the best material to print a Extruder? PLA or ABS

2

Depends…

3

For the extruder? either… The thing that you should base your filament selection on is what you want from your PART… I’d recommend PLA if you are just starting out as it has less issues with warping :wink:

4

Sorry, I have written the question wrongly Instead, it should be “Wat is the best material to print a Extruder”

5

Anything a motor (or something potentially hot) mounts to should be ABS (or other higher temp filament, such as Nylon, -T-glase-, etc.).

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Agreed with @Tony_Olivo . For the motor mount/main body, use ABS, for gears and such, it doesn’t matter much. Both PLA and ABS will hold up with a bit of lubrication on moving parts.

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I’ve seen plenty of RepRaps printed from PLA and working fine (my extruder is PLA, for example), though they were only printing PLA so temperatures weren’t as high as if it were printing ABS. If you’re going to print ABS, I’d think printing the extruder in ABS would give you a little more safety margin in case a fan fails, etc.

T-glase actually has a fairly low temperature for starting the glass transition (70 degrees c or so) so while it’s awesome material, I wouldn’t use it for a motor mount. :slight_smile:

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Thanks @Laird_Popkin @Thomas_Sanladerer @Tony_Olivo @Jarred_Baines for you help, then I will settle with ABS for now.

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@Laird_Popkin , that’s good to know about T-glase! Thanks for the correction.

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I printed a PLA extruder for my Mendel90 with J-head extruder.
The combination of convected heat from the print head and motor heat caused the extruder to warp. The motor tilted, and the J-head mount stretched out causing terrible prints. I’ve since replaced it with ABS without problems. By the way, I print mostly ABS and Nylon, so I’m often at 220C to 250C. I also recently switched to an E3D hotend, which may have eliminated the convective heat problem.

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@Robert_Wozniak Good point - if you are printing ABS or Nylon, you really need the extruder to be ABS. For printing PLA, a PLA extruder works fine for me =.

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I had a place x carriage on my RepRapPro Mendel, I was having trouble with abs and put it into an enclosure… The hot end mount was SUPER warped when I pulled the machine apart to see why I was getting bad prints… Changed to abs with much better results…

My extruder gear also warped a little when I used the machine in hot weather one day… Was glad I had just printed a spare!