anyone printing with cf or gf? What dryer are you running?
All the time.
I have used several dryers now, both at work and at home. At work we have some fancy things, but for home I have been most happy with the Polymaker Polydryer. It has several heat settings, and holes you can spool right out of it. What cool is that if you want to, the base is removable and it leaves the material in a tub, so you could just buy several of the tubs and a single heater base.
However honestly its a lot cheaper to just buy the plastic cereal boxes everyone uses for storage, I have probably 24 or more of them now.
Note if you're drying material properly, also invest is good drying packets or individual pellets. I use the Dry n Dry pellets in little bins I made for the AMS so it keeps that environment dry, and every now and then I replace them with fresh ones, then dry out the used ones and put back into the jug. For the cereal boxes I use color changing packets.
Some things to know about CF materials....
- as stated, drying and keeping dry is important
- they WILL wear down any gears that are just plastic over time. Use hardened parts, and always hardened steel extruders / nozzles.
- CF makes nice hard parts, but keep in mind you definitely are creating things that have tiny bits of carbon nanoparticles on the surface. When you rub your fingers over it, you're splintering off those things onto your fingers. You can't see it but its there. If you sand those parts, absolutely wear a mask. Carbon filter for your printer is highly recommended.
If you want some super durable, tough stuff, look into Polymaker Fiberon CF-PA6-20. It's an amazing formulation that doesn't require a wildly hot environment and is extremely durable, could be good for many automotive underhood kind of things. However to get the strength it needs to be annealed.
PETG-CF is amazing stuff. At work its become our default unless we need it to be nonconductive. Actually prints much better and more stable than vanilla PETG.