Wood PLA help  

RE: Wood PLA help

Try it and see ...  not all printers print the same; what works for me probably won't work for you.  And all the wood filled I've printed strings worse than any other filament I've used.  

There was a post - maybe six months ago - where a person was printing wood filled and getting some amazing results using a post process script for gcodes that emulated wood grain variation.  His parts looked like real wood with hard and soft grain texture.  He was also doing some finish work to parts, he also had surface issues to clean up; but the results were admirable.

RE: Wood PLA help

I would try a preset for woodfill first, there is one for Colorfabb Woodfill or filamentum Timberfill in the filament settings.  Then review the settings in the filament tab and compare to what that filament suggests and adjust accordingly for temps first, that is probably the fastest way to get a baseline for woodfill type filaments... 

Wood type filaments tend to clog easily and a .05mm or larger nozzle is your friend for them.  6mm or 8mm nozzles tend to do better with Wood Fills.

RE: Wood PLA help

....  0.5mm , 0.6mm and 0.8mm ....

RE: Wood PLA help

Have you made sure that your wood PLA is absolutely bone dry? I haven't used it yet, but I've heard that the inclusion of the wood particles make the filament much more hydroscopic than regular PLA, and often stringing is an indication of moisture in the filament.

RE: Wood PLA help

Posted by: jbinfl

I would try a preset for woodfill first, there is one for Colorfabb Woodfill or filamentum Timberfill in the filament settings.  Then review the settings in the filament tab and compare to what that filament suggests and adjust accordingly for temps first, that is probably the fastest way to get a baseline for woodfill type filaments... 

Wood type filaments tend to clog easily and a .05mm or larger nozzle is your friend for them.  6mm or 8mm nozzles tend to do better with Wood Fills.

Hmm, guess I’ll have to get some nozzles, I only have the one 0.4mm that came with my MK3S kit, and it never hurts to have spares. Guess I’ll have to look up what kind will fit into the hotend. 

RE: Wood PLA help

Posted by: Sembazuru

Have you made sure that your wood PLA is absolutely bone dry? I haven't used it yet, but I've heard that the inclusion of the wood particles make the filament much more hydroscopic than regular PLA, and often stringing is an indication of moisture in the filament.

I hope it’s dry, I just unsealed the package the other day and I live in a pretty dry location too. Guess I could try drying it more too, but yeah it kinda sounds like stringing is to be expected almost no matter what. Which is fine, just gotta deal with it I guess, just didn’t know it was like that. 

RE: Wood PLA help

Posted by: aztravis1

Posted by: jbinfl

I would try a preset for woodfill first, there is one for Colorfabb Woodfill or filamentum Timberfill in the filament settings.  Then review the settings in the filament tab and compare to what that filament suggests and adjust accordingly for temps first, that is probably the fastest way to get a baseline for woodfill type filaments... 

Wood type filaments tend to clog easily and a .05mm or larger nozzle is your friend for them.  6mm or 8mm nozzles tend to do better with Wood Fills.

Hmm, guess I’ll have to get some nozzles, I only have the one 0.4mm that came with my MK3S kit, and it never hurts to have spares. Guess I’ll have to look up what kind will fit into the hotend. 

Ooh! A question that I can actually answer with authority instead of guess based on hearsay. 😉

The nozzles used by Prusa are E3D V6 nozzles. Many 3D printer vendors carry them, and many Chinese sweatshops clone them. I'd advise avoiding the clones if you can, but sometimes budget restrictions require compromise. But not all non E3D nozzles are crappy clones, when looking for a replacement the thread size is M6. There are some interesting tungsten carbide nozzles out there that I'm interested in, here are two that I know about (granted not all are in stock...): DyzeDesign & Ev3DM.

Though I worry about the DyzeDesign nozzles. Looks like it is a tungsten carbide insert in a steel thread, introducing the thermal resistance of steel between the heater element and the filament, partially negating the thermal conductivity benefits of tungsten carbide.

RE: Wood PLA help

I probably should have added that the stringing is very easy to deal with; a quick blast with a hot air gun removes the fine spider webbing in one pass.

I use a 0.4 mm nozzle, I tried 0.1 mm layers on a puzzle box but the parts looked pretty bad; I had very minor clogging with 0.15 layers; almost none at 0.2 mm layer height.  The Groot above was printed at 0.15 mm. There are a few "gaps" in some perimeters where the nozzle flow was slowing down because of a larger than average wood fiber. 

A different brand wood fill worked fine at 0.1 mm. But the result wasn't nearly as "wood like" as the other brand; is almost PLA hard, but doesn't clog, though smells like wood when printing, and doesn't string as much as the lighter filament.

AMOLEN 3D Printer Filament, Wood Color  - carvable, soft & stringy, heavy texture (light in color, Groot above)

3D Best-Q Wood PLA, 30% Padauk-infill - harder, nice smell, not-carvable, not so stringy, normal PLA texture (beautiful printed color, like dark stained teak)

RE: Wood PLA help

The post-processing script is here. I don't know how to install in Cura as this is my first run at Wood PLA. If it comes out well without this, I'll give this a go.