Topic: Taulman PCTPE flexible nylon help
I ordered a spool of this because I'm interested in printing with flexible filaments and I wanted to compare it to ninjaflex. Once I saw that you could print it without the reduced speeds required of ninjaflex, and it could be dyed, I was sold. It was about $32 for a 1 lb spool from maker geeks, so its about twice the cost of ABS and similar in price to ninjaflex.
It arrived and I got my calibration cubes done and I was happy to see that the settings I've been using for ABS worked reasonably well. The texture of the finished print is very similar to a milk jug, as opposed to ninjaflex which feels like an RC car tire. I printed a 2 perimeter vase at 230 C (as recommended) to see just how flexible it would turn out. I was pretty disappointed to see that it had almost no interlayer strength and cracked immediately instead of flexing at all. You sure could not fold it along the layer lines like you can see in the taulman video on it. So I tried another at 245 C to see if maybe I was just not melting it enough to get good strength, and the results were basically the same- still cracking and not really flexing much at all. I didn't even really bend it all that much, just pushed the sides of the vase together.
This compares to ninjaflex, where I could literally bend, twist and pull on it all day long and still not break the same part.
I emailed Taulman and after going thru all my settings he said that he really couldn't determine why my print was coming out so fragile.
Any tips? Aside from the small possibility of a bad spool, it seems that this material really did not live up to expectations. If any of you regulars around here (ward, elmoret, others) want to try it and see if you can get anything better out of it, I would send you a sample of it, just PM me.
