esun petg

[kazolar]

Thanks to the information in the thread. I got a good hang of printing eSun PETG -- and was able to print this giant thing. It's a perch/cave for my bearded dragon. I took a picture holding it just for scale. It was printed in 22 different sections. Glued together using weld-16 and welded with a soldering gun set at 550F -- also used my 3D printing pen in the welding process some. The top is coated with the XTC-3D, I didn't do the whole thing that way to give the dragon some texture to grab onto. The entire print took 4 rolls of green eSun PETG filament. 200 hours of print time, I had a spread sheet with all print times and weight estimates from S3D, which were pretty much spot on -- weight should be scaled at 1.2g/cm^3 not the 1.25 standard used for PLA and ABS. Time estimates from S3D were within 2-5%. This was printed with 10% infill -- which is tricky with PETG to get good top layers as it doesn't bridge well, so doing 6 top layers and keeping the fan on during the print works well. Also slowed the print down significantly for the top solid layers -- had to do multiple processes in S3D to accomplish that. Other settings -- 3 perimeter layers, 200% over extrusion for infill, infill using the crossing pattern rsilvers put together in one of his profiles (great idea). 4 Bottom layers -- some prints were done with a big skirt -- and I cam up with a trick for tall supports -- I created a square 20x20x1mm -- and I'd place it under tall supports in S3D, this way tall supports have a good base to stand on. There was very little support material used though, I'd say less than 2% of the filament used was support material, I don't like to use it and I wanted to get the best finish look possible, so I sliced up the model in such a way to avoid having supports. Other note, the print was done in a 200 hours straight, I stacked the prints in such an order as to (a) use the filament most efficiently, and (b) use time most efficiently, so that I'd be able to switch to the next print with no time in between, so my M2 was running for 200 hours straight.

Here is one of the pieces in action on the M2

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Here are a bunch of top pieces -- jigsaw puzzle

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Here are a bunch of bottom and other vertical sections

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This is the cave next to the printer -- note the scale

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This is me holding the cave -- 8lbs worth of plastic BTW

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[Tim]

Good lord, that's a massive print. Four spools and 200 hours! What a marathon. I'm awed. Nothing says "robust" like an M2 running 200 hours straight. . .

[kazolar]

Good lord, that's a massive print. Four spools and 200 hours! What a marathon. I'm awed. Nothing says "robust" like an M2 running 200 hours straight. . .

Half way through I was thinking -- what did I get myself into, but nice to get up in the morning or come home from work and see the printer finishing up the last of the top layers -- as planned. Out of 22 pieces I only re-printed 1, and that was totally my fault, and it was a 120gram piece, so since I needed 3.6kg of filament, I had enough to cover in 4 spools. eSun PETG is very good in terms of consistency, each spool measures within a gram of 1010 grams of filament. So I was able to be very efficient with filament use -- I have 2 spools with less than 10 grams left, and 2 spools with 130 and 150 grams left.

[Jules]

Spectacular job! (Would love to see a follow up pic with your lizard enjoying his new perch! )

That's got to be one heck of hefty lizard!

[kazolar]

Spectacular job! (Would love to see a follow up pic with your lizard enjoying his new perch! )

That's got to be one heck of hefty lizard!

here you go

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[Jules]

Spectacular job! (Would love to see a follow up pic with your lizard enjoying his new perch! )

That's got to be one heck of hefty lizard!

here you go

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Ooooh - he's pretty!

[Quark]

Sorry, late to the game here, but didn't know if I should start a new thread for this.

Has anyone had issues with the filament's tolerance? I just got the Yellow petg from Amazon, and the first few meters of my roll were really thin, down to 1.67mm. Later into the roll, it starts to get back into specs, though still have seen areas where the filament is a bit oblong, 1.7mm one way, 1.75 the other. Other than having to recalibrate my slicer settings, this thing prints awesome. I have a black petg I haven't open yet, and a black ABS I got with my printer that I may never open.

[Jules]

Sorry, late to the game here, but didn't know if I should start a new thread for this.

Has anyone had issues with the filament's tolerance? I just got the Yellow petg from Amazon, and the first few meters of my roll were really thin, down to 1.67mm. Later into the roll, it starts to get back into specs, though still have seen areas where the filament is a bit oblong, 1.7mm one way, 1.75 the other. Other than having to recalibrate my slicer settings, this thing prints awesome. I have a black petg I haven't open yet, and a black ABS I got with my printer that I may never open.

If it's the eSun brand, I've never had an issue with the PETG filament, but occasionally i'll see a pretty hefty diameter swing in the PLA. As long as the diameter stays under about 1.8mm, they won't cause that much of a problem. If it gets really flattened and oval in shape, or if the diameter gets up into the 1.90+ mm range, you'll start to see problems with jamming. (ie: The cleaning filament.)

Just cut the bad section out, and keep on going. I rarely have two bad spots in the same roll.

[jimc]

I dont print pla but the petg, epc, abs and a couple other typs from esun i have found them to be really consistant. I actually cant tell you the last time i measured a spool of petg. I am able to keep my settings all the same from spool to spool, color to color. With any plastic though you can get an odd irregularity.

[PcS]

I have gotten two rolls of petg that had bulges ruin prints as it was so fat it got stuck in the tube. They do seem to have issues at times.