Tag: colorfabb_xt

How to post-process co-polyesters

Of course we love our prints as they are. We put great effort to choose the best materials and the finest materials. With our “How To…” posts we want everybody to be able to create the best prints possible on a wide variety of printers. We have written before about post-processing our metal filled filaments, which literally truly shine when processed the right way. More links to blogs about post-processing these special filaments can be found here.

Beyond the special filaments, which have great aesthetic properties, we also have our range of co-polyesters: nGen, colorFabb_XT and colorFabb_HT and we received quite a few questions about post-processing these materials. To find our more about the materials themselves, check out the blog we have written before by clicking here.

Developed by Eastman Chemical Company, Eastman Amphora™ 3D polymers are the basis of our co-polyesters and offer a low-odor, styrene-free choice that is uniquely suited for 3D printing applications. With Amphora, items can be created that are more functional, more durable, more efficient, and attractive. With superior melt strength and dimensional stability, our range of co-polyesters deliver advanced bridging capabilities to create stronger and more detailed items—with low odor and low emissions.

Now, once a print comes of the printer and you want to be doing something truly functional with it you may need some kind of post-processing with it, also called secondary operations. Be it painting, drilling or glueing there are multiple ways to work with a printed object once it has been printed, but before you can use it. You can truly bring 3D printing into your life by making useful applications.

For instance, you need to drill into a part. This should be no problem with co-polyesters. We recommend drills specifically made for plastic. Steel drills are possible, but only when grounded. Tips like these are to be found in the brochure that Eastman has prepared and which you can find by clicking here.

Click on the image below to find the full guide prepared by Eastman Chemical Company:

Our range of co-polyesters are available online.

Scissor Snake with our colorfabb_XT

We found the very handy scissor snake on Pinshape by Richard Swika and printed it with our colorfabb_XT. This design “enables people with limited use of their hands to manipulate small objects at a distance in a fun and effective way,” according to Swika.The original design can be found on Pinshape: https://pinshape.com/items/25747-3d-printed-scissor-snake-easy-grip-custom It can easily be customized according to your needs.

We printed this design as one single print on the Ultimaker 2, using colorFabb_XT Light Blue as our material of choice with a layer height of 0.15mm. colorFabb_XT has the right properties for this print which need strength and toughness.

We launched colorFabb_XT 2 years ago at the London 3D Print Show together with Eastman Chemical Company. Eastman is our material partner for co-polyesters. colorFabb_XT is made with Amphora AM1800 and has a unique formulation for 3D Printing that features excellent properties : High strength and very high toughness, Odor Neutral processing, High Tg / improved temp. resistance, Styrene free formulation, FDA food contact compliance, BPA (Bisphenol A ) free formulation. It will allow the user to produce 3D printed functional products in a safe way.

You can find the data sheets and other documentation on our website: http://colorfabb.com/Materials/

colorFabb_XT is available in 14 colors, including clear.

3d printing colorfabb colorfabb_xt functional light blue pinshape scissor snake ultimaker 2

Darwin bust

Charles Darwin is of course the 19th century naturalist who popularized the concept of evolution. He wrote both On The Origin of Species and The Voyage of the Beagle, both classics, laying the ground work for over a century of science and debate. A great man to honor by printing a bust in colorFabb_XT and while we are at it, we printed two.

The surface finish is very smooth, being printed with a 0.16mm layer height on an Ultimaker 2 at 45mm/s.

The design by the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney, Australia can be found here.

colorFabb_XT is made with Amphora AM1800 and has a unique formulation for 3D Printing that features excellent properties : High strength and very high toughness, Odor Neutral processing, High Tg / improved temp. resistance, Styrene free formulation, FDA food contact compliance, BPA (Bisphenol A ) free formulation. It will allow the user to produce 3D printed functional products in a safe way. With Eastman Amphora™ 3D polymer, items can be created that are more functional, more durable, more efficient, and attractive.

colorFabb_XT is currently available in 14 colors (including clear).

colorFabb_XT was launched in September 2014 at the London 3D Print Show as a first collaboration between colorFabb and Eastman Chemical Company. It was the first of four of the Amphora co-polyesters which we released as 3D printing filaments. colorFabb_XT was followed in 2015 by nGen, early 2016 by colorFabb_HT and recently by our first foray into semi-flexible filaments: nGen_FLEX.

You find find out more about printing with colorFabb_XT by clicking here.

3d printing bust colorfabb colorfabb_xt darwin feature

TCT Show 2016 recap

Hi all,

We wrapped up the TCT Show 2016. Packed our goods, stacked them on the pallets and everything is heading back to colorFabb HQ again soon. We’re about to board our plane and leave Birmingham once more. It has been a great two days in Birmingham, meeting old friends and making new ones. We were there with our partners Stacker and Eastman Chemical Company, answering all your questions, showing the prints and the printers and giving away a lot of free samples of our co-polyesters.

Two true artists dropped by: Steve Cox and Tony Short. They brought us their finest prints to showcase at our booth. Steve brought a statue, printed with bronzeFill and manually polished:

Also, Tony Short dropped by and gave us a fantastic present: a gift box based on the colorFabb logo. You can see it for yourself. This gift is much appreciated and will get a special place at the office.

As we said, true artists who not only know how to print, but how to post-process to achieve the highest quality possible.

Of course we had a big announcement at the beginning of the show. We launched nGen_FLEX this week and the initial reactions at show were extremely positive. Our new flexible filament has a Tg of over 125 degrees and is extremely well suited for engineering parts and prosthetics. Based on a co-polyester from Eastman, you can be assured of the high quality of the material. We have created a dedicated landing page for nGen_FLEX, which you can reach by clicking here.

We recently sent a few people spools to test nGen_FLEX and we saw an overwhelming support for our latest filament. Here are a few mentions of our beta testers:

Layer adhesion is great and you can use this semi-flexible material with a Bowden tube, which we showed while printing on an Ultimaker 2+ with nGen_FLEX continuously during the show.

nGen_FLEX is now available in black and dark gray.

The one feature print everybody talked about was the OpenRC F1 Car, designed by Daniel Norée, we published about last week. If you missed it, you can catch up here. We printed the entire car (a full 107cm long) with co-polyester based filaments: nGen, colorFabb_XT, colorFabb_HT, XT-CF20 and of course our latest nGen_FLEX which we used for the tires.

The F1 car was mostly printed on the Stacker S4 during the summer. We had the Stacker on site during the TCT, printing technical parts – 4 at the same time! The Stacker S4 is a perfect printer for large scale projects and small series production. You can find more information by visiting our website: http://stacker.colorfabb.com/

A final honorable mention goes out to the team of Creat3D, our UK distributor. They built a big colorFabb tower at their stand!

We want to thank everybody who visited us or followed the TCT Show through social media. Special thanks to Ludovic and Richard from Eastman, as well as Norston from Stacker to man the stand with us during these two busy days. It was great meeting everybody again and are too many to mention.

We hope to see you again next year!

(Oh, and don’t forget: the 10% discount code in our webshop will be valid the entire weekend. Use TCT2016 as the coupon code for a 10% discount on all spools of filament!)

3d printing colorfabb colorfabb_ht colorfabb_xt eastman ngen ngen_flex show specials stacker steve cox tct tony short

OpenRC F1 project release

Earlier this year we came across the new design Daniel Norée made: an F1 car, his follow-up to the OpenRC Truggy design we had printed previously. “After a bit of thinking I came to the conclusion that a Formula 1 car would probably a perfect follow up project to the Truggy!” says Daniel Norée. Hence, the OpenRC Formula 1 car was born.

As he stepped up his game we felt we had to step up ours as well. First of all we set our print engineer Jos Deelen at work with scaling up the design to 250%. When it came to a choice of materials we didn’t have to think for very long: co-polyesters. Which one? All of them. We found that different parts had different requirements and with nGen, colorFabb_XT, colorFabb_HT, XT-CF20 and our brand new nGen_FLEX. we almost had all our bases covered. If you want to know more about co-polyesters, click here for a blog we posted this summer explaining these great materials we developed with Eastman Chemical Company.

The tyres were made with our new nGen_FLEX filament, released during the TCT Show om September 28th 2016. You can read all about our new semi-flexible filament here: https://learn.colorfabb.com/ngen_flex/

We have published the 250% scaled files on Thingiverse: Thing:1834126. On Thingiverse you can find all the files as well as a more detailed description about how to build your own 1m long OpenRC Formula 1 car. The helmet used in the driver seat is Thing:170222.

We are very proud of the result:

“I learned alot from the OpenRC Truggy and i wanted to use what i had learned in the new project,” Daniel told us. His aim was to design a car with a simpler design and without the hard-to-source parts. According to Daniel, another important part was the material: “While many failed on the Truggy due to the need of hard to print materials like Polycarbonate and it´s likes this time materials like PLA or Co-Polyesters should do the job.”

He spent a couple of intense weeks in Fusion 360 CAD designing the F1 and the result was introduced at a trade fair in Sweden together with Autodesk.

Although Daniel aimed to make a simpler design, the sheer size of the F1 car was a great challenge to get it right. And we did get it right. Due to the size of several parts we used the Stacker S4 printer for the bulk of the print work with great results. It measures a full 107cm from the front to the end. Using all the functional materials (old, new and upcoming…) we had at our disposal we completed the job and recently we took the car out for a test drive.

You can see the results below:

The F1 car will be on display at the TCT Show next week where you can find us at stand B36, running the co-polyester filaments on the Stacker S4.

You can find more about our co-polyesters on our dedicated landing pages for nGen and colorFabb_HT. Our colorFabb_XT, nGen, colorFabb_HT and XT-CF20 are available online.

Follow Daniel Norée’s work and especially his Open RC project here: http://danielnoree.com/?cat=6

Get a quote for the Stacker S4! For the USA, click here. For Europe, click here.

3d printing amphora co-polyesters colorfabb colorfabb_ht colorfabb_xt daniel noree f1 ngen OpenRC stacker xt-cf20

Lamp hanger in colorFabb_XT

As these things go, summer is coming to an end and days are getting shorter. To continue that much needed work in the garden in the evening hours more light is needed. We do not print light, but we can print the fixtures for the lamp. This custom designed lamp hanger brings the solution. Printed with colorFabb_XT it shows once again a functional (and in this case, a much needed) application for 3D printing.

The machine used was a KosselXL and we printed with 0.16mm layer height.

Filament used: colorFabb_XT Black

colorFabb_XT is available in 14 colors: http://colorfabb.com/co-polyesters/colorfabb-xt

colorFabb_XT is made with Amphora AM1800 and was the first material we launched together with Eastman Chemical Company back in 2014.

It has a unique formulation for 3D Printing that features excellent properties : High strength and very high toughness, Odor Neutral processing, High Tg / improved temp. resistance, Styrene free formulation, FDA food contact compliance, BPA (Bisphenol A ) free formulation. It will allow the user to produce 3D printed functional products in a safe way. Eastman Amphora™ 3D polymer is a low-odor, styrene-free choice that is uniquely suited for 3D printing applications. With Amphora, items can be created that are more functional, more durable, more efficient, and attractive.

Learn how to print with colorFabb_XT: https://learn.colorfabb.com/print-_xt/

3d printing black colorfabb colorfabb_xt custom design functional kosselXL lamp hanger xt

3D printed vacuum tool

We printed two of the vacuum tools recently featured by Thingiverse and designed by Zivbot with colorFabb_XT in light green and light blue. Excellent prints for practical use.

Design: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1571860

colorFabb_XT: http://colorfabb.com/co-polyesters/colorfabb-xt

Eastman Amphora™ 3D polymer is a low-odor, styrene-free choice that is uniquely suited for 3D printing applications. With Amphora, items can be created that are more functional, more durable, more efficient, and attractive.

amphora colorfabb colorfabb_xt thingiverse vacuum tool