I have been requested to print mechanical sprockets using Delrin or POM filament. Everything I’ve seen online points to the absolute pain it is to print this stuff. Supposedly its near impossible to achieve bed adhesion, and once you do then it’s still difficult to print this stuff and you have to go very slow.
Does anyone have experience printing this filament in ANY FDM printer?
A better question would be, does anyone have experience printing this filament in their X1C?
I am hoping for good adhesion, but it will be a bit before I get the chance to post my experience here. My thoughts are as follows:
Nozzle temp at 210C to 220C
Engineering plate at 120C with no gluestick or any adhesive
Doors and top lid closed (possibly even electrical tape covering the gaps on the front door)
Duct printed for the chamber fan and a hose that goes to a vent out a window (I heard heating POM to 230C can release VOCs like formaldehyde)
Speed for everything cut to between 30 and 50 mm/s
Avoid geometries that require support
Please let me know your thoughts and experiences.
My recommendation is to not bother trying on the X1 series.
I’ve printed with it, and got a reasonable looking Benchy, but fundamentally the chamber does not go hot enough to enable you to print dimensionally accurate parts without any warping.
My best results were as follows:
Gluestick coated printer paper, stuck to the engineering plate with gluestick as a printing surface (you get one hot-cold cycle before you have to re-do this so it’s certainly not ideal). Engineering plate with no glue with give you no adhesion.
120C bed (which in my case required some fudging as I’m in europe).
60+C chamber, thoroughly pre-heated, and insulated to ensure it’s not going to drop during printing.
Chamber fan off (which in my case was using an old firmware so it doesn’t turn on automatically at higher temps)
Settings something like this:
POM benchy on left (note the significant warping away from the bed, the issues on the bow, and the cooling issues on the chimney), standard PLA benchy on the right.
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Thank you so much for your thorough response! This is very helpful. I bought a 250g roll as a test so I may just let them know it’s not viable depending on my results. Did you print anything as a functional part from POM?
One more question, with the glue, paper, glue, giving you one heat cycle, did you need to do anything special to clean the plate between prints? I imagine i will need to scrape the paper off then wash with Dawn and clean with isopropyl alcohol after before reapplying everything.
consider making dovetailed inserts in the part.
POM is a hell of a filament, I resolved in many cases doing that instead.
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How did it go for you @GenghisJohn ? I’m looking to make some parts out of POM myself.
Piggybacking off your original question - is there other suitable alternatives that are ‘doable’ in the X1C?
Thanks!
