New filament review from Aurarum - Natural ABS

lithgowlights

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May 6, 2010
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OK I though I'd post something here as far as an unpaid review of some filament. I recently ordered 3 rolls of natural ABS from Aurarum and Aurimas, the owner, offered me some of his "new" ABS formulation instead of the one I had printed about 12+ rolls of. Tough call, so I immediately said yes :)

OK The original Natural ABS was slightly yellow in color, had reasonable strength, and printed about 3000 LED light covers in the last 12 months, so I know it pretty well. After printing the covers, just 2 walls thick, no infill (See Pic), so they were a little brittle if you squeezed them. I could break them with firm pressure from one hand, so in order to both seal them to avoid moisture getting between the layers, I hot acetone smoothed them before being undercoated with a plastic primer and given 2 coats of automotive clear coat for UV protection. The LED's did not fail last year, and look as good as the day they were printed

Now the new Filament. I printed with exactly the same temperature, speed, and on the same printer that I have been printing for months (Same file), and noticed a few things.

1. The filament is whiter, well less yellow, and more similar in color to their natural PLA. The old yellow color used to actually offset the slightly blue hue of the LED and give a more natural tone, but this is keeping that color tone and not altering it. Not a big deal to me, as the covered LED's will match the uncovered ones a little closer

2. It's slightly less opaque. This is subjective and not tested with anything but my 48 year old uncalibrated eyes. It's not going to be noticed by the thousands of people who come to my Christmas Display (See Pic), so it's not a negative, just a point to mention.

3. It prints well, and maybe a little too runny, and Aurimas did say it can be printed cooler than the old ABS as at higher temperatures it acts like PLA and will tend to cause fine filaments when retracted. I did not see that, but looking at the prints I think there might be a little over extrusion and it looks like it's flowed a bit more against the layers below. I am printing 30 covers at a time at 100c bed and 225c extruder on a Flashforge Dreamer, so each cover has adequate cooling time between layers.

4. Strength. Holy <insert swear word here> hell is this stuff strong. Maybe it's the higher temperature, maybe it's the filament, but where I mentioned I could break a 2 wall LED cover with one hand, I tried 2 hands with the new filament and.... nothing. I stepped on it before it broke. This is unlikely to be a winning point for many out there, but for me it was a real shock - I had to handle the old covers with a bit of care until they were vapor finished in case I broke them, but these are stronger than the finished old filament covers, and I have not tried to vapor finish it yet, so I expect even more strength (or a puddle of melted plastic if it goes wrong lol)

I am not sure when this new Filament will be available from Aurarum, but I intend to grab another 5 or 6 rolls in the coming weeks as I love it, and I still have 1500 -2000 more covers to print for this year, and each roll only gets just under 500 covers
 

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