The day is here! I took the package from 3DXTech that I'd been eagerly awaiting in, and threw it into the printer. I preheated the printer to 370C hotend, 160C bed, and 160C chamber, and hit print.
It's extruding!
It's printing!
It printed!
It's not pretty, but you know what? We'll go ahead and call that a success!
I wondered, though: in all the Ultem prints you see in promotional videos and stuff, they're colored this translucent golden-brown. How come my prints are rough, opaque, and tan?
I increased the temperature by 20C to 390C.
Nope, still tan. What's more, this time it started warping, so I redid the bed scrape procedure and added a brim. I guess Vision Miner wasn't kidding about having to reapply the glue every print.
I decreased the temp for the next print to 350C.
Jam.
Okay then. Back to 370C it is.
This is even worse now. wtf?
What's more, just removing it from the bed caused it to snap. Ultem should not be behaving like this.
Remembering that Nylon sometimes takes on a rough texture after absorbing moisture, I decide to throw the spool into the oven for a couple hours at 220F.
Wow. That looks much better.
That's lesson #1: Ultem really hates being wet. Dry it, even if you've just taken it out of the spool.
Time for a Benchy.
Hey, that looks great! Except I'm already seeing traces of the tan bubbles coming back, and I only dried this filament 3 hours ago!
Lesson #2: Ultem is really hygroscopic. It absorbs enough moisture from my relatively dry household to become unprintable in mere 5 hours. From this point on, I took to drying my filament before every single print.
Ah well, I guess that's what you have to live with when you print Ultem.
I played around with Ultem a bit longer, did a short stint with selling some MK3S fan shrouds, and got pretty good at Ultem. The final print temps I settled on were 380C hotend, 217C bed, and 95C chamber.
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| This was not a cheap print. And yet, I never got around to installing it, and it's now misplaced. |
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