World Map

 

Every material has its right application. Our woodFill is mostly decorative and we came across a great world map that begged to be scaled at 300% and put up as a fitting decoration for a baby’s nursery.

Design by 2c2know (design link)

Lasting for over 75 hours, it took quite a while to print dozens and dozens of parts. (Add to that the 3+ hours to organize and put up this puzzle). We printed on the Stacker S4 XL, its largest model, with a 0.8mm nozzle and at 0.35mm layer height (with 15% infill). The print temperature was 220C and we had the bed heated at 65C

Launched in 2013, woodFill was our first special 3D printing filament. It has been a bestseller for over 6 years and we fully understand why: the ease of printing, the authentic wood structure and the smell of wood while printing make it a fan favorite. Read more about woodFill and its origins in last year’s blog.

As with most large prints we printed this world map on the Stacker S4 XL. It is next generation industrial grade 3D printing, based on the technology and experience of the S2 and S4 printers. Featuring unique closed loop servo motor system and a massive 61cm build space (in all directions), the Stacker S4 XL is the ultimate production platform within FDM for large scale and small series 3D printing. As you can see it also works very well for decorative printing, like this world map where needed a certain size!

 

 

As many of you know, we are the distributor of Stacker 3D printers in Europe. We have been working with Stacker ever since their first prototype and now have several in our print lab. In the past 7 years we have seen 3D printing emerging from a hobby market to more professional uses. A lot of our users are using 3D printing to make a living or at least support their business in one way or another. We recently published two blogs about Dutch companies Optima and Mifa and their use of Stacker 3D printers.

 

For Stacker the term “industrial grade” is not a hollow marketing term. It means their printers are designed for extra long service life, extremely low maintenance and that the printer will maintain its positional accuracy throughout its life cycle. This printer has been designed to be used in a professional environment, be it for large prototypes or small series production.

Interested? Get a quote or contact us!

Lithophanes

The art of making lithophanes is about 200 years old. It consists of etching an image in very thin translucent porcelain and use a light behind it to make the art visible. Historians claim that the idea originated from China, a thousand years ago or even longer. It used to be a manual process with, admittedly, stellar results. It made (and still makes) for great personal gifts.

With the growing popularity of 3D printing we have seen an increase of lithophanes posted on social media. The treshold is lower to start making one and the results can be amazing. Mind you, it still takes some skill to make them truly astonishing. Below are a few of the examples we have seen over the past few years. A special shout-out to Steve McGarr from Carlow, Ireland who has been posted quite a few and offers the designs in his Gadunky webshop. You should definitely check his work out and get his amazing designs.

Not only do our all-round PLA Economy White and PLA/PHA Standard White give great results, as you can see below our users have made lithophanes with nGen and colorFabb_XT as well!

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bup5gRjn352/

 

I’ll post this again; Happy Birthday Stan
byu/Retropally in3Dprinting

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/B1ADCFDInWL/?igshid=1n6wkihtskvxk

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/BdJUvWwHqsB/

 

https://twitter.com/TreeTopArts/status/895105988142915584

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/B0FevrEC-7_/?igshid=7wzzy2q56i8j

 

 

https://twitter.com/smcgarr/status/1073752469468004353

 

 

 

One thing has not changed since the early days: creating lithophanes is still a craft and it takes some skills to make it look great! You can easily click on the images above to go straight to the orignal posts made on social media.

All the mentioned materials are available in our webshop and ship daily, worldwide and from stock. Find out more about the filaments and their properties here:

Our print team is currently working on some prints as well. Stay tuned for more from our print lab.

Heroes

“… I won’t say a hero, ’cause, what’s a hero?”

Heroes are big right now. Super heroes mostly. Marvel, DC, Star Wars… Our screens are filled with them and looking at the social media feeds we see them coming by regularly. So we printed our own heroes. Not for the first time and  not for the last time. And we like to print BIG! So we printed all these busts on various Stacker 3D Printers with our signature PLA Economy filaments.

PLA Economy is a great all-round high quality 3D printing filament, available from stock. Only available on large spools it is perfectly suited for the maker making large, long or a lot of prints and in need of reliability and quality.

Meet the heroes

We’ll start with the Merc with the Mouth, Deadpool himself:

Printed with PLA Economy Red, 32 cm high

And yes, we have printed Mr Pool before… This 32cm print, designed by David Östman, is nothing to scoff at, but the smallest of the prints we made for this occasion.

Next up: Everybody’s favorite neighborhood Spider-Man was printed with PLA Economy Red as well on the Stacker S4 and it measures almost 46cm:

Spidey was also designed by David Östman, known under his online moniker Eastman (not to be confused with the chemical company). You should definitely check out his collection of amazing designs on MyMiniFactory and give it a try yourselves. The large Jon Snow bust we printed a few months ago was also designed by him.

 

Finally we have the most recent hero: beloved bounty hunter and Baby Yoda’s surrogate dad The Mandalorian:

It took 120 hours and a whopping 3.5kg of PLA Economy Black filament to print this 49cm high statue. This print was designed by Rober Rollin, who – like David Östman – has a terrific collection of super hero, game and Star Wars related designs on MyMiniFactory.

 

Design credits

The amazing designs of these heroes were made by:

 

About PLA Economy

PLA Economy is available on 2.2kg, 4.5kg and 8kg spools only. It is very well suited for the maker who needs quality filament at an affordable price. It is a perfect material for large volume and small series production, made with the guaranteed colorFabb quality that we are known for.

PLA Economy is now available in six of the most popular colors. ColorFabb PLA Economy is not a standard PLA. It has been modified for better layer adhesion and flow properties to get better performance over other basic PLA filaments. Because it’s made with the same processing technology used for other premium colorFabb products, this PLA Economy will be just as reliable.

Not sure if our big spools fit on your printer? Check out the dimensions here or print XL your own spool holder!

 

varioShore TPU infill

Last year we launched our new flagship product: varioShore TPU. It is a 3D printing flament which is flexible in more ways than one. Even after release we keep testing filaments in our printlab to see what the best practice is. One thing we keep testing amongst others is varioShore TPU’s infill and have opted for the gyroid infill.

We used Cura’s gyroid infill setting on the Ultimaker S5. The gyroid structure, aside from having a nice wave-y pattern, ensures an even distribution of strength throughout the model. It belongs to a class of mathematically minimal surfaces, giving the same strength as a hexagon infill, but with less material.

“A gyroid is a naturally occurring structure which be found in butterfly wings and even within membranes inside cells. In 2017, MIT researchers discovered that when graphene was shaped into a gyroid structure, it had exceptional strength properties at low densities. They then discovered however, that the crucial aspect of this was actually the gyroid structure itself, and that other materials such as plastic could benefit from this.” ~ Source: Matt’s Hub

 

The print settings used on the Ultimaker S5 were:

  • 0.2mm layer height
  • 25 mm/s print speed
  • 70% material flow
  • 240C nozzle temperature

varioShore TPU allows users to vary the density of the material by adjusting temperature and material throughput (speed & layerheight). At temperatures between 200 and 250C the materials will start to expand to roughly 1.4-1.6 times its original volume. This means the material can be printed at low flow rates (60-70%), to compensate the active foaming, which in return gives very soft printed parts. Between 190-200C the material can be printed without foaming, resulting in different haptics and harder prints compared to foamed samples.

 

 

For this development colorFabb partnered with Lubrizol Engineered Polymers, a leading global producer of Thermoplastic Polyurethane (TPU), used in everyday consumer and industrial applications, with a strong global manufacturing and supply network.

Lubrizol Engineered Polymers’ expertise in TPU chemistry was key to provide a customized TPU with a wide range of processing temperatures and adequate melt viscosity, meeting the requirements during extrusion and printing. A wider range of thermal stability and melt rheology allows an extended upper range of printing temperatures to maximize the range of densities achieved through colorFabb’s unique filament foaming technology.

The result is a filament with a base TPU of 92A, which will work with most standard extruder set-ups for both Bowden and direct drive systems.

We’re not done yet with varioShore TPU. You can expect more news soon.

 

 

B25j Mitchell model plane

We have posted about model planes and drones before and know the model plane and drone communities are avid 3D printers. We saw a great model of a B25j Mitchell plane on Facebook recently and asked the maker, Coen Loos, for more information. He was kind enough to share some more details.

Printed by Coen Loos / design by 3DLabprint / all images by Coen Loos

Coen works at a school and got in touch with 3D printing there. He has been an avid 3D printer ever since 2015 and specifically focusses on model planes. He mainly uses designs by 3DLabPrint, specialist in 3D printable plane models. Coen was the first one using 3D printing with his local model plane club and people were skeptic at first… until he flew his printed plane!

The classic North American Mitchell B25j was mostly printed on the Prusa i3 Mk3 and made with our PLA Economy filament. Coen says: “colorFabb is my prefered brand due to its good service, reliable filament and perfect printing results.” Always glad to read that! Some smaller items were printed with nGen and Ninjaflex filament on the Ultimaker 2+.

The print settings for the main parts on the Prusa were:

  • Layer height 0.25mm
  • Nozzle temp 230c
  • Bed 55C
  • No cooling fan
  • Single perimeter of 0.42mm

Coen has chosen PLA due to its reliability but sees the need for more specific filaments. For that reason we sent him spools of our LW-PLA and varioShore TPU for further testing and we look forward to the results of that!

You can find this and many other plane models available for purchase at the 3DLabPrint website.

The results are amazing and Coen is planning on the maiden flight soon and we’re sure we’ll update you on that! Thanks for sharing, Coen!

 

About PLA Economy

PLA Economy is available on 2.2kg, 4.5kg and 8kg spools only. It is very well suited for the maker who needs quality filament at an affordable price. It is a perfect material for large volume and small series production, made with the guaranteed colorFabb quality that we are known for.

PLA Economy is now available in six of the most popular colors. ColorFabb PLA Economy is not a standard PLA. It has been modified for better layer adhesion and flow properties to get better performance over other basic PLA filaments. Because it’s made with the same processing technology used for other premium colorFabb products, this PLA Economy will be just as reliable.

Sport Seat prototype

When it comes to prototyping, 3D printing has already earned its stripes over the past years. Designers and manufacturers have seen the benefits of how 3D printing technology allows for faster and cheaper prototyping and having a first (or second or third) proof of concept ready for their customers in mere days instead of weeks or months in those pre-historic days. As a demonstrator we printed a sport seat prototype:

The sport seat was designed by Pete S and you can find the original files at Grabcad. Scaled at 50% the print is 360x290x430mm.

We used our PLA Economy Light Gray filament for this print on the Stacker S2 printer. The print took about 60 hours to complete with a 0.2mm layer height and printing with a 0.4mm nozzle. We used approximately 570 grams to complete the print.

PLA Economy Light Gray is the latest addition to our PLA Economy range of filaments. We released it last year and has proven to be a very popular filament. It is not an exact match, but very close to RAL 7035. PLA Economy is very reliable and works extremely well for long projects!

With the addition of this very nice subtle gray shade we offer our users another much requested color. PLA Economy is available on 2.2kg, 4.5kg and 8kg spools only. It is very well suited for the maker who needs quality filament at an affordable price. It is a perfect material for large volume and small series production, made with the guaranteed colorFabb quality that we are known for.

The sport seat was printed on the Stacker S2. The Stacker S2 and its larger siblings (Stacker S4 and Stacker S4 XL) are industrial grade FFF 3D printers. Multiple print heads and a large build volume make them versatile printers. Small series production or large scale prototyping are no problem for the Stacker printers! This US based printer is very reliable and is a perfect match for any professional looking for serious 3D printing. You can find the full product specifications on our dedicated Stacker page.

For Stacker the term “industrial grade” is not a hollow marketing term. It means their printers are designed for extra long service life, extremely low maintenance and that the printer will maintain its positional accuracy throughout its life cycle. This printer has been designed to be used in a professional environment, be it for large prototypes or small series production.

Interested in the Stacker printers? Get a quote or contact us!

XXL spool holder

Size does matter it seems… Back in the day we started out with small spools containing 750 grams of filament (7 years ago now, man time flies…). Over the past few years we have made materials available as 2.2kg, 4.5kg and 8kg spools. More and more customers need a steady flow of filament, but most printers do not support large spool formats of themselves. That’s why we have adjusted our Duck Spool holder for XXL spools (containing 4.5kg of quality colorFabb filament):

Download your XXL spools holder here

Our filament spool holder is a remix of the FIlament Duck by Lukas Rambold (original design here) and already our third iteration:

(We currently do not have any plans to release one for our 8kg spools)

We printed the XXL spool holders, which we actively use in our own print lab, with PLA Economy Red on the Stacker S4 XL. This print was made with 0.2 layer height, 20% infill and a 0.6mm nozzle.

Please note: 2.2kg, 4.5kg and 8kg are mostly available in our Economy range of filaments (PLA and PETG). Please check stock levels per individual article for availability. We can produce most of our materials on larger spools, but lead times of up to several weeks do apply. Contact us for the options.

About PLA Economy

PLA Economy is available on 2.2kg, 4.5kg and 8kg spools only. It is very well suited for the maker who needs quality filament at an affordable price. It is a perfect material for large volume and small series production, made with the guaranteed colorFabb quality that we are known for.

PLA Economy is now available in six of the most popular colors. ColorFabb PLA Economy is not a standard PLA. It has been modified for better layer adhesion and flow properties to get better performance over other basic PLA filaments. Because it’s made with the same processing technology used for other premium colorFabb products, this PLA Economy will be just as reliable.

About Stacker S4 XL

The Stacker S4 XL is the latest offering in the Stacker portfolio. It is next generation industrial grade 3D printing, based on the technology and experience of the S2 and S4 printers. Featuring unique closed loop servo motor system and a massive 61cm build space (in all directions), the Stacker S4 XL is the ultimate production platform within FDM for large scale and small series 3D printing.

As many of you know, we are the distributor of Stacker 3D printers in Europe. We have been working with Stacker ever since their first prototype and now have several in our print lab. In the past 7 years we have seen 3D printing emerging from a hobby market to more professional uses. A lot of our users are using 3D printing to make a living or at least support their business in one way or another. We recently published two blogs about Dutch companies Optima and Mifa and their use of Stacker 3D printers.

 

For Stacker the term “industrial grade” is not a hollow marketing term. It means their printers are designed for extra long service life, extremely low maintenance and that the printer will maintain its positional accuracy throughout its life cycle. This printer has been designed to be used in a professional environment, be it for large prototypes or small series production.

Interested? Get a quote or contact us!

Contest winners

Contest is now closed. All winners are announced below.

In January 2020 we’re holding a #MadeWithcolorFabb contest. All our customers are invited to share their prints on social media. Every five days we select a winner who gets four spools of filament. At the end of the month we select a winning Read more about the contest here. We will select several winners during the month which will be posted below (most recent one on top).

 

January overall winner

The big winner is the impressive, and still on-going, Mimphonium project. Check out the website for more information. Printed parts are made with PLA/PHA Standard White. Domenico Marseglia is the winner of 10 spools of colorFabb filaments!

 

January 30th

https://www.instagram.com/p/B76jVxuItX0/

A holder for a monochrystalline quartz, part of a million dollar laser amplifier by YAGjunky made with PLA/PHA (original Instagram post)

 

January 25th

Automated cat feeder system by Douglas Craig, made with nGen Dark Gray (original Tweet & design link)

 

January 20th

A garden hose connector by The 3D Smith (The Netherlands), made with PLA Economy (Original Tweet)

 

January 15th

https://www.instagram.com/p/B7S_7GnHVaP/

A lamp shade by Johan Gude (The Netherlands) made with copperFill and a strip of colorFabb_HT (Original Facebook and Instagram post)

 

Winner January 10th

https://twitter.com/Derek_Cameron/status/1215142137156730880

Printing a 1/4 scale rail road piece by Derek Cameron (USA) on the Blackbelt 3D with Color on Demand (Original tweet)

 

 

Winner January 5th

https://twitter.com/JouniLunden/status/1213449123648737285

A nut dispenser for birds made by Jouni Lunden (Finland), using nGen and PLA filament. (Original tweet)

 

Prints in the banner designed by David Östman and Rober Rollin, printed by colorFabb with PLA Economy filaments. Check out Rober Rollin’s website here.

 

See all the entries on:

 

#MadeWithColorFabb

Update: you can find the contest winners here.

 

We’re always curious what you make with our filaments. With the holidays fresh behind us we want to know what you printed recently. With #MadeWithColorFabb we start the new year with a month-long contest. Win four, or maybe even ten (10!) spools of filament! Read the rules & start posting.

Mandalorian design by Robert Rollin (link)

How?

It’s easy: Share your print on social media (Twitter, Facebook or Instagram), tag us with our official accounts and use the hashtag #MadeWithColorFabb

That’s all you have to do. O, and give credit to the designer if it is not your own.

 

What?

Any print will do, as long as it is made with colorFabb filament.  We will judge based on originality, functionality, quality and prefer new and recent prints over previously posted prints. You know you’re awesome, we know it. Now it’s time to show the rest of the world and all our followers.

 

Who?

You post, we judge. Judges will be fair and unbribeable and consist of colorFabb employees.

 

Why?

Because we like to reward great prints. Every five days we will give away four free spools of filament to what we judge is the best entry. Cut-off dates are January 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th, 25th and 30th. On the 31st we will give away 10 free spools to the best print of the entire month – which may or may not be one of those who have previously won.

 

When?

The entire month of January. Tag us and use #MadeWithColorFabb and you’re in. Only photos and videos uploaded until January 31st 23:59 CET apply.

 

Where?

We’ll re-post social media and announce winners there, in our blogs and newsletter. By participating you agree that we can use your work for promotional purposes.

 

Jon Snow bust design by David Östman (link)