1 Comment

Well, I think filaments with glass fiber or carbon fiber tend to do better on all engineering-related tasks, but they are brutal on your nozzle. I recently got a diamond-tipped nozzle and have not used it on CF or GF filaments yet, but I plan to soon. I wanted to see how it performed before I put basic filament sand paper in it.

So far, even printing with glitter PLA or speckled PLA does not seem to have a wear effect. Diamondback claims that they have Diamond Nozzles that have never been replaced, that's exciting to consider.

From what I have noticed, print direction, and orientation have a huge effect on part engineering performance. Layer adhesion has a significant affect on final part performance. So some have experimented with "brick-layering" of layer lines, ex. CNC Kitchens' recent video, but others have experimented with non-planer printing, or 5-axis printing too.

If you can get the carbon fiber or glass fibers to 'cross-weave' even just a little bit, I bet you could improve the performance of the part. Imagine a sort of "basket weave" "non-linear" "brick-layering" print.

I think, eventually, slicers will get sophisticated enough to do some of these small off-plane techniques, but for larger, more dynamic movements with a greater number of degrees of freedom, printers are going to have to get a lot more complicated.

I can see slicers improving bit by bit over the next few years, but to get printers that are better at 'engineered parts,' you would have to pair those features with ones that satisfy a much larger market of people printing high-quality non-engineered parts.

Bamboo did this with the multi-color (material) and other automated tweaks to make prints better on average, so maybe, a solution that got rid of the need for supports might be something that would incentivize a mass market solution.

Other than that, I think print orientation and sticking with the filament options available are your best bets. You could even use 3D-gloop to combine a few sub parts with different print orientations to maximize strength.

Expand full comment