I started 3d printing back when you had to build it all from scratch, and it seemed ABS was the only filament to be found. PLA came along soon enough and made things sooo much easier. Then came some more exotic ones like TPU or Nylon I think, but I never tried them out because they seemed pretty niche.
But now I’m getting back into it after some time and am seeing PETG popping up more and it seems to have become one of the mainstream materials now.
Are there any other key materials I should become aware of these days? Has PETG started to replace ABS as a superior “high-temp” filament? Does anyone have experience with these?
I’m fond of PVB, as anyone who’s read my posts here may have noticed. Prints with similar settings to plain PLA, but can be smoothed with isopropyl alcohol, and smoothed prints can be pretty close to truly transparent if that’s your thing. Also, smoothed prints have much improved interlayer adhesion, for obvious reasons.
I’ve printed a couple of spools of PETG at this point, and it’s touchier than PLA, but still easier than the ABS/ASA/HIPS family plastics. In particular, it likes to be stringy, so you need to either tune your retraction or do a certain amount of postprocessing on prints to get uniformly smooth surfaces (I mostly settle for the latter, and “good enough”).
I also have a spool of PCL (filament with a very low printing temperature) that I keep meaning to get around to playing with. What can I say? It was on sale. (I buy mostly from filaments.ca , who often have somewhat exotic plastics among their house brand filaments, although they can never seem to keep them in stock. Just as well, since it keeps me from impulse-buying LLDPE or the like.)
Idk but my experiences with abs / ASA have been way more positive than petg. Even with just a ender in a cardboard box.