Sample filament Sunday's, #2. Wood infused filament.
Today's project: Clearly label the bathroom door. Serious business here people...
I consulted my sample and remnant filament and decided that today we're going to be working with timberfill wood filaments. Specifically these:
To make a contrasting sign, we'll need two different colors. I chose the rosewood and "light wood tone" colors.
Next. Does a suitable bathroom sign design already exist? I'm guessing it does, clearly labeling the bathroom is likely a universal need.
We're in luck! Thingiverse user HJ3D posted a remixed bathroom indicator sign that looked like it would clearly get the point across and as a bonus had a touch of humor. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2004803
For printing, I started with standard settings for PLA. This printed the base of the sign great, but started to get stringy on the raised portions of the sign. Cooling fan was already on, backing the temp down 10*C helped, but did not eliminate the ooze. I chose not to lower the temp further for two reasons.
1. Filament One recommends a .5 nozzle, and I was printing with a .4 nozzle.
2. I had a nasty nozzle jam with a different wood filament awhile ago and didn't feel like taking apart my extruder today...
You can see the sign turned out great! It actually ended up being 3 colors, because I was low on rosewood and used some timberfill "champagne" to print the middle part of the sign. That's why the line in the middle is a different color.
Excellent. No further bathroom door confusion. Mission accomplished.
Other thoughts:
-I played with temperature variation (+/- 30*C) to try and make the filament print lighter or darker. It worked a little bit on the light wood tone filament but was not really noticeable on the darker rosewood and champagne filaments.
-Timberfill feels like wood, it's texture is rougher than normal PLA 3D prints. Both before and after printing
-This filament also appears to be very consistent. In my opinion, this is really important for an infused filament. A previous wood filament I tried had small chunks of wood in the filament that like to cause jams. This filament worked fine, I do still need to see what happens when it's printed colder. Future update.
Thanks for reading!
Sample filament Sunday's, #1. Metal impregnated filament.