I just finished building and testing my M2; and so far; am loving it. I picked it up as a value-added service to my consumer product design and development business because it just makes sense to have that ability in house; as opposed to sending everything out to expensive service providers. Nearly all of my products are intended for the consumer or medical market, and most commonly my CAD is directly developed for injection molding. Most of the parts I design for injection molding have a 1.75-2.5mm wall thickness (nice and consistent, drafted for ejection, etc) and I very typically call out ABS-PC (good moldability and super toughness), PC (super tough, clear options), HDPE / PP (for stuff that needs living hinges or will truly taking a beating), and Nylon (for extreme temps and top-notch impact strength; at the expensive of finish and color)
Id like to offer a way for my clients to use their prototype casing for more than fit-and-finish checking; and maybe even sell their parts while they establish demand for injection tooling (which is very expensive). That said, the parts needs to to be pretty tough against real world use and without substantial changes to the design (IE increasing wall thickness etc). In a nutshell, I want to find the materials that are most closely aligned to production-grade plastic as possible. I wonder if you guys don't mind weighing on with your experience on some of these selections, and possibly offering any I might have missed. I'm new to this stuff so its pretty likely I have the wrong idea of more than just a couple of these; please help set me straight where ever needed.
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PLA: easy to extrude but cant tolerate heat at all, (I'm in AZ, so this is bad); Also, it seems somewhat brittle and might not tolerate impact so well.
ABS: Much tougher than PLA but as I understand it, somewhat tough to extrude. Therefore repeat-ability might be tricky
ABS-PC: This is my go-to choice for injection molding but I can imagine its pretty difficult (like 'ABS') to set up and use in an FDM machine. Still might be worth exploring
PLA-CarbonFiber: I think this is a little gimmicky, because people LOVE the words "carbon fiber" I would imagine it suffers the same shortcomings as PLA alone
ABS-Carbon Fiber: Again, Might be a little gimmicky and probably much harder to extrude than PLA-Carbon Fiber
XT: I believe this is a polyester type of material, which isnt familiar for me in the injection world. The descriptions cite 'tough' and 'durable' but I cant determine if its rigid enough to work in an electronics enclosure type product.
PETG: I think this is the same thing as listed above. A few of you guys seems to really like this stuff, but again, is it a rigid plastic or a flexible when wall thickness is around 2.5mm?
Ninjaflex: This I believe is a rubber-like material, probably a good substitute for santoprene or neoprene ('TPE' to the molders). I'm not sure if its easy or hard to work with, but I do occasionally need to make rubber molded plugs etc,
PET+: The sales material looks great on this ("stronger than ABS, easier to FDM than PLA"). It sounds like the perfect material to use for electronics enclosures... is it overstated?
T-Glase: This one is a mystery to me, sounds like a material similar to PC, which would be great, but its really hard to find any reviews on it
Nylon: Nylon is the wonder plastic in the injection molding world, but its got limited color options and I understand might be really hard to use in FDM. correct me if I am wrong
Guys, I cant thank you enough for the insight. I need to get educated fast on this stuff and I cant think of a better group to poll; so I'm really excited to hear your feedback.