Hello CD, as we approach the end of the off-season, we are making our final preparations for the new season. I have a question that has been on my mind. What type of filament do you use when building your robot? We have a Bambu Lab A-1 Mini printer, which we’ve been using for about 6-7 months, and so far, we’ve only used PLA and TPU filaments (we managed to get good quality on PLA prints , but I can’t say the same for TPU, probably because we haven’t mastered it yet). I’m curious about which filaments other teams use for 3D printed parts on their robots, and what things they pay attention to. I know that 3D printing technology is very important for FRC, and I want to learn new things. Thanks in advance for your answers.
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TPU has to be dry to print well. Even when I got OK prints on TPU, they improved noticeably with the filament dryer.
PLA or PLA-plus are good for most of what we do (mounts, shields, etc.) We haven’t gone into any more exotic materials as that’s not what’s remotely limiting factor for our program.
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We have had very good luck with PETG. It is very durable, not quite as brittle or stiff as PLA and very easy to print with. Very good bed adhesion particularly on the textured Bambu bed and Majigoo or other bed adhesive/release agent. We make some snap-on covers for swerve modules and clips/spacers for shafts etc with PETG where the slight flex is a huge benefit and much easier to print than very flexy TPU on a Bambu. There is a new formulation on the Bambu site, PETG-HF, which we don’t have much experience with but seems very similar to the prior PETG from the few offseason prints we have done. And PETG comes in lime green, which is very important…
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95% of our prints are Bambu PLA Matte. With proper print settings and design it works fine almost everywhere we want to use printed parts, including pulleys, gears, and spacers.
We have occasionally used Prusament PCCF and Bambu TPU (haven’t tried TPU HF). Historically we used Duramic PLA Plus, and there is still some in the shop.
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We use ABS, TPU, and Carbon fiber nylon for most of our prints. Both cf nylon and tpu need to be dried really good to print well. We do use PLA for prototyping and other small parts but have mostly moved to ABS where we used to use pla all the time.
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as a team we mainly use pla or pla+ from various vedors and occasionally some tpu prints. weve had much success with them and dont think were going to be moving from them as theyre good for what we need.
however ive done prints for my own robotics projects such as a 3dp swerve module and found petg and specifically inlands petg+ filaments to be great. its much stronger and less brittle than pla and has yielded me much success. however the main issue w tpu and petg is that you should dry them before using which may require the team to buy a filament dryer.
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While I haven’t used any prints on any of my team’s FRC robots, I’ve used a few different filaments on my smaller scale combat robots, and I’ve found that 98A TPU has given me the most strength. That being said, I’ve never used any CF filaments, so they might be stronger for the weight.
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Lately we’ve used PLA, PETG, and various Nylon/CF flavors (Onyx, Bambu PAHT-CF, and now Polymaker PA12-CF10). TPU is cool.
Well designed and printed PLA/PETG parts are just as competitive as the fancier filaments.
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Because in the region we live in it gets quite hot, everything on the robot has to be PETG, ABS or something with a higher melting temperature than PLA. We’ve have had PLA melt in the trailer while going to competition
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We use PLA, PETG, TPU, and Nylon-cf, depending on the use case
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We have 2 prusa mk3s and 1 mark one. Some mentors and students have printers we also use on occasion. We use regular pla for awards or art stuff (team logos, name tags, etc). We use petg for non load bearing spacers. We use pc-cf and onyx for load bearing parts (basically pivots with spine xl). We tend to print gears in petg, then upgrade to pccf, then to metal if needed after each failure.
I heard good things about pla+. We haven’t used it but heard it’s pretty good for most applications.
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PLA and polycarbonate right now because I had the filament. I’m reprinting common thunder hex spacer (1/16, 1/8, 1/4, 3/8).
Pro tip. If you need to use support, and you have auto filament changing, use a second filament that doesn’t bond to your main one as the support. Makes removal easy.
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I use a mix of sources, most of them PETG because it’s South Carolina and it gets hot.
GreenGate3D deals in recycled PETG, and their quality has been immaculate in roll after roll. It is not the cheap stuff, but it is the GOOD stuff. This year’s SCRAP trophies were run with a mix of Black, Bubblegum, and Spearmint. They put a voucher in your team’s dashboard this year to cover half a spool. Use it and thank me later.
Protopasta makes a lot of interesting artisanal stuff. They also use a lot of their production waste to make a pretty useful recycled PLA (and there’s now a recycled PETG counterpart I haven’t sampled). We used it to make spacers, test plates, and even some test gears for an intake that never happened Bought in 6-packs, it comes down to about $15/kg shipped; you can Amazon hunt to get spools cheaper, but if you want a consistent supply at a good price that’s certainly in the zone. They too have a PDV in your dashboard. Use that too!
Prusament isn’t cheap stuff either, but I used it to make the SCRIW champion trophy this year and it came out great. (The black is GreenGate3D, because I had it on-hand.)
(The finalist trophies were done in Duramic PETG. I don’t love it in the age of Bambu speeds; it requires an incredibly slow print speed, though the silver seems to be exceptionally bad as last year’s champion trophies were done in gold Duramic PETG and I could run them incrementally faster. The strip of white tape on the middle one was covering the names of this year’s SCRIWDriver Award recipients; much like the in-season Volunteer of the Year award, this is chosen in advance.)
While I’m not wild about Duramic PETG, Duramic PLA Plus is my preferred “I need to Amazon something now” solution. Pricing gets weird as Amazon varieties are wont to do, but they have a great variety of colors. I’ve also got some Elegoo Rapid PETG that I need to audition in my printer but which comes highly recommended.
I have only dipped my toe into the TPU waters; Polymaker and Overture have both been fine.
While most filaments benefit from it, PETG and TPU will particularly benefit from a session in a filament dryer. I use this cheap EIBOS unit. When not in my AMS, my filament lives in 47-quart gasketed totes that seal well and hold 10 spools each. I made a printed riser that goes in the bottom so you can dump in desiccant and not have it getting all in the spools.
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I thought I would make a quick note on PETG vs PLA based on your response. While PETG seems durable and less brittle than PLA in your hands, it actually tends to have poor impact performance and experiences brittle failure under high strain rates. The modern “tough” or “plus” variants of PLA have equal or better impact toughness depending on the brand. PETG is a decent choice when you need more temperature resistance and can’t print ABS, ASA, nylon, etc.
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Our teams use the following:
eSUN
- PLA+ (Pretty fast, low-cost, and works fine for most of our non-motion parts)
Generic Amazon Special
- PLA Silk (One of our team colors is gold and this is pretty low-cost)
Bambu Lab
- PLA Basic (We bulk order for the season to get the discount)
- PC (For some of our tougher parts that we’d like to emulate COTS parts)
- Nylon-CF (We’re moving more stuff to nylon-cf as more final robot parts)
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I’m a huge fan of West3D’s in-house Ambrosia filament. They have a variety of materials (everything from basic PLA to carbon fiber and glass fiber filled polycarbonate or ABS), and lots of great colors. Spending an extra few dollars per spool to have consistent colors, diameters, etc, is well worth it imo. There are lots of other great brands, but for personal and team use for the last yearish, they’ve been our primary supplier.
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8033 prints a lot of Duramic PLA Plus - it’s our default filament at this point for pulleys (with metal inserts) and various mounts and low duty parts. We run it on our bank of Prusa Mk3i at the lab.
For heavy load stuff, I print Polymaker PA6-CF (which they’ve rebranded into a more complicated name I haven’t worked out yet) on my personal BambuLab X1C. I dry all of the nylon first in a small dehydrator and then store it in my AMS which is packed with desiccant. It’s cheaper to buy the 2kg spools, but then I have to respool it for use in the AMS. It’s worth it, but a pain.
I also print our wheels out of Overture TPU 90A.
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PLA is underrated, I think, but the problem with heat affecting PLA parts while transporting the robot is a real issue. Mostly we’ll be using ABS and ASA, but CF nylon will be in the mix, and I am getting good results with CF PETG. I’m also looking at some of the exotics.
My general rule is that if it may need to take a blow, either do not print it or add metal to the print to make it strong. If it does not need to take a hit, use a filament that can survive being loaded in a truck on a hot day.
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For those who’ve had PLA parts melt inside of hot vehicles/trailers, I am curious if you’ve experimented with any PLA+/PLA Pro/Tough PLA variants?
Back in the day, a co-worker’s 3D printer deformed when he left it in a hot car, so I’m familiar with the effect. But I’ve not seen the same thing happen since switching to PLA+ for everything. (Full disclosure: I do not live in a region that has a lot of extreme heat days, but I do tend to leave a lot of robotics stuff in my car for extended periods of time.)
Generally, if PLA+ isn’t strong enough for the task, we either use TPU or abandon 3DP for that part altogether. The newer PLA+ formulations are “not your father’s PLA,” and may be worth a second look for some applications.
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I’ve had plenty of PLA and its tough variants begin to deform in hot vehicles. Looking at Polymaker’s spec sheets it looks like their PLA variants have a glass transition temp of 60C. We have a black trailer and are in the south. We also transport our robot in regular vehicles to practice fields where direct sunlight can become a concern. It can easily reach 140F on a hot & sunny day, for that reason we don’t print using PLA for anything remotely critical. We use PETG and some TPU.
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