I’ll soon be printing a largish set of radius gauges which will be used outdoors and will get exposed to all kinds of weather. They need to be tough enough for real-world usage (e.g. they will get dropped and/or tossed about).
I have both ASA and PETG-CF on hand and, being quite new to 3D printing, can’t decide which would be the more appropriate. Can someone please tell me which of the two filaments you think would be the better choice, and just as importantly, why?
Please, I’m not interested in other filaments, which I don’t already have and while I do have PLA I know that would be a a very poor choice for this job.
PETG can melt in hot cars, metal sheds etc.
Fibre-reinforced filaments (like PETG-CF) should be handled with gloves which can make them annoying to use for tools. Small particles of the fibre get into skin etc.
Hence I would use ASA.
However, the dimensional accuracy of fibre reinforced filaments is better (they shrink less) but this can be overcome with print calibration or just scaling and reprinting.
Thanks for the quick response. I know that PETG in cars can at time be problematic but that’s really not a concern for me. However, I didn’t know that fibres might separate from the printed item and that most certainly is an issue for me, as I normally only wear gloves when welding and grinding, never for woodwork. Thanks for that.
You’ve made my choice simple; ASA it will be.
Because I create the gauges using a FreeCAD macro I’ll look up typical ASA shrinkage rates and incorporate an adjustment into the macro and just have it generate a new set of step files.
EDIT: After a brief search for the shrinkage rate I think the best idea is just print one or two of these gauges and measure them after at least a day, just to ensure they’ve settled to their final size.