Category: Uncategorized

Short answer: yes — but only if you treat “food safe” as a property of the whole system, not of the filament. No 3D-printed part is food-safe straight off the build plate, no matter what the spool label claims. To make a genuinely food-contact-safe part you need four things working together: an FDA-compliant base resin…

Short answer: drop infill to the lowest value your part’s job allows — 0–5% for display pieces, 10–15% for light-duty parts, 15–20% for most functional parts — and never go above ~40% expecting a strength return. Infill density has steep diminishing returns: published community testing (CNC Kitchen’s compression tests, reproduced across slicer communities) shows that…

Short answer: match the process to your part, not the other way around — and for most buyers, the budget question splits three ways. If you need a handful of complex, high-precision parts (medical, aerospace, tooling inserts), DMLS/SLM laser powder bed fusion is the workhorse: machine-time costs run roughly $190–375 per hour, and a typical…

Short answer: among printable thermoplastics, PEEK is the most heat-resistant — it survives continuous service at 260 °C (Victrex 450G data sheet) — followed closely by PEI (ULTEM), which handles continuous use around 170–200 °C. But “most heat-resistant” is rarely the right question to ask. The right question is what your part actually needs to…

Short answer: use ASA. It is the only common filament engineered for outdoor exposure — its acrylate chemistry gives it inherent UV resistance, and it combines ABS-level toughness with a heat deflection temperature of roughly 93–103 °C (Prusament ASA: 93 °C HDT, 42 MPa tensile; Polymaker PolyLite ASA: 102.6 °C HDT, 38.6 MPa tensile). If…

Short answer: yes — for most desktop-scale functional parts, PETG is strong enough, and it is often the best single choice when you need a part that survives real use. Its tensile strength lands in the 48–53 MPa range on manufacturer data sheets (eSUN lists 52.2 MPa per GB/T 1040; Prusament lists ~50 MPa per…

Short answer: for most prototyping, PLA is the better material — it is cheaper, faster, more dimensionally accurate, and prints on any machine with no enclosure. ABS only earns its place when the prototype must survive heat above ~60 °C (hot cars, near motors), absorb repeated impacts without cracking, or be smoothed with acetone to…