I made a prototype assembly for an overseas customer and they’ve been testing it. They’ve asked me what material I used for one of the parts and it turns out to be Hello Matte Red PLA. This part is supposed to be in steel on final production units but my printed one is holding up in durability testing so they wanted to produce the preproduction units with printed parts like mine (I didn’t do steel either because it’ll take special tooling to make) but their printed ones from a local jobber are breaking. I thought they might break myself so I printed a few extras (I have here) so that I’d have them for my testing in case one broke and none had broken, so examining the part I find it’s very (unusual for PLA) flexible I’m printing one now in regular non-matte pla but I have a feeling I’ll be able to break it because similar parts are like it are regular, brittle, breakable PLA.
My question. is there something about matte PLA that makes it different? I used the whole roll in their job so if it’s a unicorn I might not be able to reproduce it. They have the jobber coming into the factory now. he’ll be there in a couple of hours so it would be good if I could tell them something about the composition of this PLA so they can reproduce these parts there with locally available materials.
Glenn, I have a roll of hello 3d matte red here at home. I haven’t printed a lot of it but so far it seems very similar to regular pla. If you have a small stl part I’ll print it and break it if you want to compare roll to roll?
well, I guess they figured it out. The rep came to the plant and saw it for himself. no other feedback just that they think they have the issue solved, They go on holiday for 10 days next week so everything is under a lot of pressure for them now.
So thanks, I haven’t been out to the shop yet to see what the regular PLA part is like. From what little info I can find online there are some differences in flexibility between matte and shiny PLA’s but no info on what they use to make it matte. I only used this because the part was supposed to be red or yellow and this is the red I had on hand.
I have seen regular PLA, PLA plus and PLA matte for sale. PLA plus is more flexible (a bit) then the regular PLA which I find to be brittle and thin parts breaks easily. PLA is often a dull finish so is it different then the matte finish.
Is the HEllO brand any good otherwise IE: printing adhesion etc??
I’ve had a few spools of Hello, no issues that I’d noticed. it’s PLA so it’s kinda like sausage stuffing around here, never paid much attention to it until now. The matte stuff is definitely better. one of the parts I printed I stopped early because there was a fillet missing, it has 2 arms (see below) and I can bend it around a pretty long way without it breaking, it’s pretty stiff too and doesn’t turn white where it’s bent like I expect. I would have used PETG for this if I needed it to last longer, that’s my go-to if I don’t want it to break or ABS that I don’t print too much of these days. It has its place but too much fiddling. This is not a critical part to the operation of the unit so I just used the red I had on hand. it’s funny how you learn new stuff heh. I’ll get some more of this and use it instead of PETG now and see how different colours act.
