When using the A1 or A1 Mini, what is the strongest filament for printing plastic gears? I am going to make a filament spool winder that has a handful of plastic gears. It says to use ASA but I don’t think it’s recommended on the A series and I never printed ASA before. I read about and watched a video that is 3 years old but he recommended the BASF PLA Pro1 as being in the top 3 for the strength testing he performed. That was 3 years ago so I am curious if the results are still good. I also se Creality has a PLA that was made in cooperation with BASF and I wonder if it the same as the BASF Pro1?
I’ve used PLA+ for a pasta roller drive I made almost four years ago and none of them have failed in the 3 years of use it saw. They were all double helix, the straight gears above are going to be weaker, most people use double helix gears for printed stuff as they are much stronger. I doubt a spool winder would see more torque than mine.
PLA will be fine. There should be little strain on the gears, and easy to reprint if they fail. If it is the pastamatic respooler, the weak points are the spindles. They are printed vertically, with not much wall thickness, and the layers will separate if the threads are tightened too much.
Alex,
Thanks for the reply. I was thinking of working my way up from less expensive filament to see if that is really necessary. Plus some of those high dollar filaments need heated chambers or at least an enclosure and I was wanting to print the gears on an A1 or Mini. But I appreciate the info as I looked into PA-CF and I may invest in some in the future as it looks really good.
Duane777,
Good info. In fact I ordered the 4th place finisher in the above video as it was close enough to the top 3. I bought some eSun PLA+ from Amazon in a 2 pack and there is a special bonus offer presently where you get a FREE spool of PLA-CF on qualifying purchases which are the 2 roll packs. The free one only comes in brown but who cares. What percent infill and top and bottom layers and resolution did you use on your gears? Do you think certain colors make a filament less strong and if so, what colors to avoid? And here is the spooler I am building with the motor drive somewhat like the Pastamatic.
Thanks
It was a long time ago but 3 walls and 25% infill should be fine, it was printed on my ender 3 so I don’t think I did anything too fancy. I made each successive stage bigger to deal with the output torque. The printed output drive did break, which I changed to a 8mm metal rod pinned to the final drive. Repurposed a dead A3 Epson inkjet printer to make it. this was the 1st version before I change to double helix.
Looks interesting. I am going to build the one I showed above as it looks like a great design and thoroughly tested. The older I get the less time I have for experimenting so a well designed model is the way to go. Thaknks for the info on the settings. I now have a whole bunch of PLA+ on order in a few different colors in case I have to learn about the color pigments causing strength issues. It’s always something . . .
Matte filaments are best avoided if you want strength. They tend to have very bad layer adhesion (even when printed at higher temp), and are overall more brittle.
Black PLA has a lot more colorant compared to many other colors, and “bright” white PLA can be similar. Translucent PLA tends to have less colorant and more virgin PLA content.
Some brands of PLA are better than others. For instance, I have some old rolls of “Prototype Supply” / “Toymaker Labs” PLA that is more like PETG in strength. (and I would love to find more like it, but they seem to be long gone)
Yeah, I gathered that from the video. The video left a lot of questions as Gray PLA was in the top 3 but which brand? And the results were all over the place where white and black had high reading as far as strength but not if too much pigment was added to them. Or maybe I read that in the comments. So the more translucent the colors, the better. But in the end we can expect the clear or natural, and the most translucent colors to be the best bet overall.
What percent infill and top and bottom layers and resolution did you use on your gears? Do you think certain colors make a filament less strong and if so, what colors to avoid? And here is the spooler I am building with the motor drive somewhat like the Pastamatic.
