I’m wondering if anyone has tried or had success with printing BASF Ultrafuse or Virtual Foundry metal filaments. Any thoughts / tips / interesting failures?
i’m wondering same, should work if i buy that filament, right?
You should be able to. I got a small sample of the BASF Ultrafuse with my last printer.
Couple things to remember:
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You have to mail off the finished prints to get processed. You add parts to a prepaid bag and ship them off and get them back a couple weeks later. You get one processing ticket with the filament roll and in theory you can print the entire roll and the one ticket covers that entire roll and many parts. But if you want to print out a small part and have it processed, it eats up your processing ticket. Each additional processing ticket is like $50.
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You’re probably going to need an extra hardened extruder/nozzle assembly just for printing this material. You don’t want material cross contamination.
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You’re really limited on size and design. It’s like 100mm x 100mm x 100mm and you can’t do any complicated shapes or overhangs. You also can’t use supports. There are some metal specific support filaments, but my printer wasn’t high end enough to use them.
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And the biggest issue, at least for me when I was trying it out, was the scale. You have to print things larger than they are going to be when finished. However, to make things more complicated, the scale is different for the X axis and the Y axis, so it’s not quite as simple as scaling to size. Originally we had to design every part we wanted to print ourselves and then mess with the scale in AutoCAD. Eventually, the proprietary slicer I was using added a plugin that would fix the scale for you, but even that was wonky sometimes and didn’t work correctly. There was a bit of a learning curve on this to get part size/scale correct consistently.
We ended up not purchasing any more of it once the sample spool was used. Fun to play with though.
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For practical use metal infused filaments aren’t quite perfected yet
The you have to calculate for shrinkage and the strength properties aren’t really there yet (shear strength and impact) compared to many well made polymers
If it’s a nice metal finish you are after consider using graphite spray on the print and electroplating it, you’ll get far better results with far less hastle and when done correctly plating actually adds a lot of strengthening properties to the print
That’s why it’s a bigger niche with the resin printing group, resin prints are generally fragile but print very fine details with almost if not invisible layer lines.
Plating a resin print give it the strength qualities it lacks
Yes you can plate fdm prints but you need to post process it a lot more to smooth it out before plating, still a very good option over direct metal infused filament in my opinion
I found some nice metal filled fillaments from Protopasta that look pretty good with minor post processing. But I suspect to get it looking good, you can’t have a complex design at all. Seems like these sample photos are just some flat surfaces that could easily be block sanded to like 2500-3000 grit. They probably get polished after that.
Printed:
After processing:
Apparently some will patina nicely too, which is pretty cool:
Here’s a recent video that explains everything in a nutshell
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I have started testing the BASF Ultrafuse 316l with the X1C for my company. We have our own sintering ovens, which is handy.
After some trial and error I got it to print pretty well. Did not work in the AMS though, too soft to survive the retraction when switching filaments. It’s a shame, because BASF also sell an interface layer material, which could make more complicated prints viable for sintering.
Another issue I’ve been having is that material tends to build up on the nozzle, which may cause issues if it falls of in a bad spot. Maybe better settings could solve this.
The Magigoo printing adhesive specifically for 316l is important, otherwise the material sticks too well to the build plate.
Some settings I found useable, there are likely better ones to find:
- 0.16 layer height and 0.4 hardened nozzle
- 245°C nozzle temp, 105°C build plate (engineering)
- All cooling off except for overhangs. Chamber fan on 50%
- Speed 20 mm/s for everything except overhangs 10 mm/s
- Retraction on 1.5 mm at 45 mm/s
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Hey, I was wondering if you have any updates over the last year with using BASF Ultrafuse 316L with the X1C? We just got one in our company lab and before I potentially ruin the extruder, did you use the stock hotend or change to to another hotend that Bambu sells? Have you tried Ultrasfuse 17-4 PH at all?