After printing ABS almost exclusively for about a decade, I'm rediscovering PLA and its fancy variants
After printing ABS almost exclusively for about a decade, I'm rediscovering PLA and its fancy variants
I think 1kg spools are too much, I want to experiment with ALL THE COLORS... But few manufacturers offer 250g, and they are sometimes twice the cost by weight.
Agreed, large spools are too much if you want to play around with all the colors. I have a box of old filament, each spool in plastic with a dry packet and the whole box with a couple of bags of drying stuff and a good seal on the top. But after getting a spool out to use recently (spool about 2 year old) and it printed like shit. I tried putting it in a dryer, but it didn't help. So I tried more of these spools and they almost all seem to have gone bad.
Such a shame, I should have bought smaller spools, but they are harder to get and often more expensive.
Same. I go through periods of printing a lot then getting busy and not touching it for months. I've noticed my PLA and PLA+ get really brittle as they age even when stored in a dry box and drying again before use.
I can usually get it to print but I have to be gentle with it.
I buy samples from Atomic Filament when I don’t know which filament would work best for a project. They are 50g spools for under $4 each. It is usually enough filament to print out a filament sample card and a small test piece.
That's $80 per kg.
You could try a filament sampler pack, but this might be too little of each color. Maybe buy a few packs 25 Colors Silk Shiny PLA Filament Sample Pack
PLA as a raw material is really cheap - you can get it for as little as a few dollars a kilo - and a lot of the cost of a filament roll is just making the spool, packaging, and shipping it. In the end, the price difference between 250g and 1kg of PLA on a roll is rather tiny. Goes the other way too, you can buy 5kg rolls that come down to just $10-15/kg.
The same reason why a can of cola is so expensive compared to a big bottle.