What's your go-to "Bang for your Buck" filament brand?
What's your go-to "Bang for your Buck" filament brand?
As I'm graduating college in a few weeks, I'll be losing access to my university's free printers and filament. I'm going to build up a home lab with a couple printers where I can make goofy little mechanical projects as well as some components for my cars and stuff.
Who's your go-to for PLA and ABS/ASA filaments? Those will be my primary print jobs in any serious volume. I know our college's club has had hella problems with random chinese brand filaments not printing consistently but I also don't want to spend $30+ per kg for something like Prusament.
I have been using tangledfilament.com for my PLA and it's been great. Their goal is to get to $10/kg for US manufactured filament and then expand to PETG.
Oooh, tangled. Thanks for reminding me about them. Having all US produced product is a nice plus and if they can keep it that cheap domestically, I'd happily buy it for all my bulk printing that doesn't care about color. $15/kg is about as good as it gets these days.
The just had another price drop to $15/kg and their road map is going well.
Clickable link: https://www.tangledfilament.com/
Microcenter's Inland pla+ has been good to me. Microcenter used to ship it free, and they may still, but it's been a bit since I ordered. It's $15-20/kg. Some day I'll use great filament and might call this stuff garbage, but I'm not there yet. The standard pla is less impressive, causes me more grief than I like.
Inland is (or was, at least) relabeled eSun filament, and they're considered a decent brand for basic filaments. I've only ever used their PLA(+) but it's always been bulletproof.
Their stuff has worked well for me too.
In USA I usually get Printed solid's Jesse and 3D Printing Canada's Budget PLA. I also pick up a couple rolls of Inland any time I'm by my local Microcenter
Filament sourcing is pretty region specific. Where are you buying from?
TIL of Jesse, thanks for the link!
Tried IID Max's PLA+ since they were always posting discounts on Reddit. I've stuck with them since for anything that needs color, their filament is vibrant and I've never had any issues. Buying in bulk you're looking at roughly $10/kg. For my black I use Elegoo PLA. It has a nice sheen to it.
I do everything in black anyway, and 4 packs of Elegoo PLA are like $45. No complaints so far and $11-12/kg is hard to beat
The bulk 10kg options look good. I might stock up on those and packrat a few colors since they dont' really go bad
If you're shopping in the EU, I recommend Devil Design PLA - they're available through a couple of shops.
My favorite webshop tinytronics.nl (very little markup on their electronics unlike almost every competitor)
And they have both Azurefilm and Devil Design. I was debating on which to try. Sounds like J should go devil design
Thanks for the tip with the shop (shipping is reasonable and electronic components are well priced)! Cannot help with Azurefilm filament as I haven't tried it yet.
Big big fan of Fusion filaments, especially their ABS 2.0. It's what my Voron Trident is made of. It looks amazing and is the best ABS I've found to work with as of late.
I've printed a decent amount of PETG from both Push Plastic and Atomic Filament. Both have been very solid/reliable, but I would probably give an edge to Atomic as far as quality. Their PETG has never let me down. On the ASA front, I've run around 9 kg of Polymaker ASA through my Voron with another 1.5 of blue and white sitting on two different 3kg spools. I ran 2 kg of their ASA through my i3 clone printing prints for my Voron. I haven't had any problems with it, and it does occasionally go on sale for very attractive prices. I bought my last two spools on November 24th last year for $50.39 (for a 3 kg spool of blue) and $67.19 (for a 3 kg spool of white). Polymaker's ASA does require what seems like a very low extrusion multiplier (I'm currently at 0.893), but you can print the stuff blazing fast in terms of mm^3/s.
Now that I know that both Atomic Filament and Push Plastic offer ASA, I might give them a spin when I need a refill. I don't go through that much filament and don't mind spending a little extra $$ for something that could result in less headache. I also like supporting American companies/manufacturers where I can.
Sunlu pla+ prints super well for how cheap it is.
I'm in the EU and have been buying filament from https://www.123-3d.nl/ so far. They also have an English shop https://www.123-3d.co.uk/.
My go-to is their "REAL" PLA brand. It's good quality, is made in NL and comes on cardboard spools.
I am a bit fed up with all the shit they throw in with each order though, there's only so many pens and stacks of post-its I need. When I remember, I add a line in the notes field to leave it out.
Had great luck with polymaker and find they're in the sweet spot of predictable quality and price for me.
In France I'm buying from ArianePlast. It's good PLA for a decent price.
I have not tried it but they also have "Eco" PLA at 13€/kg
For PLA and PETG, I like MatterHacker, though I have been buying some Voxel PLA lately and that's been pretty good stuff too. Voxel does run sales that get the price down to $15/$16US a kilo.
For ABS/ASA, I'm still using a the same kilo of Zyltech ABS I bought 5 or 6 years ago. And I still haven't used 200g yet. I did dig it out this weekend to print a couple dozen custom cable clips for my boat with it though.
I've been using Creality's hyper PLA. It's pretty good quality and my printer/slicer combo has presets that are 95% what I want (I tweak the print and bed temps as needed). I'm using an Ender 3 V3 KE for reference.
Whatever is on sale https://3dprintingdeals.com/
Filacube's pla 2 has never done me wrong, and it's STRONG as hell
3djake's PLA is pretty decent from my experience
I bounced around a couple, my goal was to find stuff cheaper than prusament that also produced nice results. i really liked the stuff spool3d in Canada sells but ended up coming across matter3d as spool3d carries some of their products. They're way cheaper than anything I can get on amazon and I found the quality up there.
"Jinos 3D Filament” is pretty cheap. I started using them during the pandemic when it was hard to find PETG. Seem to be a small place in North Carolina that manufactures mostly for their own use? Sometimes they take a couple of days to ship.
They sell mostly on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/382556327412
[Edit: Just re-read that you’re looking for ABS/ASA - I don’t think Jinos does those, unfortunately]