MakerGear Forum

When I received my dual extruder upgrade, there was a small amount of filament coiled into a bag labeled "PLA+". There was no further explanation of what this.

Anyone know what this mysterious PLA+ from MakerGear is?

There are a number of manufacturers now making "enhanced" PLA. I don't know whether they are all more or less the same or not; I guess it depends on what you do to the PLA. I have not tried the sample from MakerGear, but I have a spool of something similar called "PolyMax" from a startup company called PolyMakr. It has approximately the same strength as ABS, and a similar flexibility (that is, it isn't brittle like standard PLA, which has a sort of explosive catastrophic failure). As far as I know, though, all these PLA variants have approximately the same (low) melting point as standard PLA, which for me is more of an issue when building things out of PLA than the brittleness. You can warp a PLA part by pressing it against a mug of hot coffee (which I've done, by accident. Don't leave prints lying around on the breakfast table!).

I have been using quite a bit of the ColorFabb PLA/PHA filament. The kids on my son's robotics team have been printing parts out of it nearly round the clock for 2 months. This co-polymer is strong, tough and very simple to get very high quality prints. When I get a chance I want to make a couple tensile samples out of it and break them on the tensile testing machine at work. We use 4 outer layers and 20-25% infill. The parts are lasting in fairly demanding applications. With the toughness of the PLA/PHA co-polymer, we do not need ABS. We are going to next be experimenting with the ColorFabb_XT and see how it compares to the PLA/PHA. When I can run some tensile tests, I will post the results up here.

-Cliff

What temperature does it start getting soft at?

cliff your going to find the xt to be crazy strong and a much higher temp resistance than the regular colorfabb pla/pha. tim i believe the temp for the pla/pha is close to the same as regular pla. the pha makes it less brittle, tougher.

Tim wrote:What temperature does it start getting soft at?

I doubt it will differ much from regular PLA. But for the majority of what we use it for that does not matter. For most so what we do it works really well. One really cool trick with the PLA/PHA is that if you need a very smooth surface, you can sand it smooth and then use a light acetone rub or vapor polish. The PHA is solvated by the acetone giving a great surface.


Jim,
We may move to one of the PET variants with more experience with them. Our focus for the last few months has been to get the high school students on the robotics team able to make the parts on their own. So an easy to use material like the PLA/PHA was very useful in achieving that. Now that we have that objective accomplished, we are going to start working with other materials. The PET is next, and then we will work on others.

most definitely. i find pla to give a slightly nicer surface finish than pet. it might just be due to the gloss of pet. its very shiny so it sort of enhances layer marks even though they probably arent any worse.

So is the "PLA+" from MakerGear the same as PLA/PHA? I guess the best way to figure out if the PolyMakr PolyMax is PLA/PHA is to run it through an acetone vapor bath and see what happens.

I got a very nice surface finish on an opaque color PET+ using a methylene chloride vapor bath (restricted to nice-weather days when I can do it outside). I haven't tried the methylene chloride on the translucent colors yet. How well it works, I guess, depends on how much it penetrates.