holy smokes it's 150 bucks for 800g

105 USD. Look at the bright side, you can save 8% by buying the equivalent amount in samples!

Neat. But hopefully the price comes down one day.

In the meantime, 0.065" trimmer line is fifteen bucks for half a kilo, in an interesting array of neon colors and strange cross sectional shapes that may or may not play nice in your extruder gears. Some adjustment of your extrusion multiplier is surely in order (0.065" is a shade under 1.75mm, at 1.651).

Obligatory CNC Kitchen article: https://www.cnckitchen.com/blog/3d-printing-trimmer-line

WHOAAAA this is so exciting!! Nevermind the awesome mechanical properties, let's hear it for the somewhat better environmental impacts!

Materials science folk will hopefully weigh in on this, but it's my understanding that PA11 is more sustainably produced, but breaks down at a similar rate to other polyamides? I think I heard they did find some things that'll eat it though.

Either way, an improvement is an improvement. Now if only Prusament would get into PHA 😈

Ha, suckers!

I don't think there's any positive environmental impact tbh. Plastics made from petrol tend to be made from by-products of the gas industry and are cheap and readily available. Plastics made from bio-sources sound eco, but actively require land and water to produce and it's not like they break down somehow better when released in the environment so are in fact net worse. Sounds like green washing to me.

Okay, but it means when the world runs out of oil we’ll still have PA

Well, regular nylon filament is also quite expensive, although not this expensive

That's what I was thinking about saying too... They're probably still mostly right, in the sense that this is a company and companies are almost always primarily concerned with their profit margin, not the environment. However like you said, most things now are made out of plastic, most plastics are made from fossil fuels, and fossil fuels need to be retired like yesterday.

Yeah the very extraction of oil releases more methane than we even know, methane being one of the most influencing greenhouse gasses.

Finally admitting CF filaments were a scam, and dangerous to work with.

I wouldn't call CF a total scam, the dimensional stiffness (not strength) improvements are very real- but they are very much the wrong solution for the vast majority of 3d printers.

Yeah they have properties that make them desireable, like making them easier to print.

I just can’t get myself to play with them knowing the air and my fingers will be full of microscopic sharp particles. Maybe they do nothing, but I’d rather err on the cautious side.

Can you 3D print trimmer line? Yes you can and not only does it kind of work; after drying the material for a night, it performs better than I ever imagined! Printability is excellent even working at temperatures that Bowden hotends could handle, and quality is awesome. Material strength is similar to what I've seen in the past with other Nylons with decent layer adhesion and impressive impact strength.

Well I'll be damned...that's pretty neat.

Also, it's a good and thorough article (as always with Stefan), so worth a read for anyone interested in doing this.