PLA Filament From China ?? Is it worth it

[Robert Bonenfant]

So my main question is buying pla filament from china is it worth it and hows the quality - I found a dealer selling it for $23 per KG 3mm - All different colors - Min Order is 1 spool 

Wanted to know if anyone else has bought from china before and had good PLA or ABS come in. 

P.S. - Im not turning on Makerbot.com or anything just spending over $40 per roll and $10 for shipping is alot compared to $30 per roll shipped - Only use MB Printers :-) 

Also im looking for a good design program? any good ideas ? Currently using Tinkercad and Google SU 

[Robert Bonenfant]

Bump - Still waiting on my REP 2 to be shipped - Hate waiting hopefully sometime this week ;-) 

[Elbot]

Problem with buying directly from China is QC. I'm pretty sure MBI and any other dealer online sells stuff made in China. However, their name is on it, so they do QC testing on it before it goes out the door and if it is bad, they'll let you refund it. I seriously doubt you can, given prohibitively expensive shipping, ship stuff to China for a refund. That's because it is cheap to ship stuff here because in China they have the option of "sea mail" where stuff sits on a boat for a month or so before coming to America. However, our greedy postal services has decided that there's no profit on cheaper "sea mail", so they only offer the more expensive "air mail" for packages from us to them. This makes it more expensive for Americans to do business with China. I'll bet that our greedy crappy post office is to blame for much of the trade deficit! Make sure you check with the company you want to order from what their refund/exchange policy is. If you can give them evidence with photos of bad spools, can you get an exchange without having to mail stuff back? Ask them. If not, then buy from an American company.

The other thing is, if you do use stuff from China and the filament diameter is variable, you'll need to do the minimalistic extruder upgrade on thingiverse or you'll get printer jams and failed prints or partial prints. If you see your models have tiny warts on them, that's the filament being too thick in some places on your roll. If you see some delamination, that's the filament being too thin in places on your roll. If you're printing bobble heads, that's fine, but if you're printing stuff professionally as an engineer, I'll buy American.

[Jon Daniels]

I had two 1kg spools (silver and red) of 1.75mm ABS from China (repraper.com) come in last week.  It arrived about 5 days after I placed my order.  I was happily surprised to find the diameter the same (and sometimes less) variance than the Makerbot filament I have been using.

This is my first print with the silver:  http://www.thingiverse.com/derivative:41716

I ordered four more rolls, including some glow in the dark and transparent.  Those specialty rolls were *really* discounted compared to the alternatives :)

[delsydsoftware]

I have experimented with some cheap ($32kg) ABS and PLA from amazon, and I haven't had any problems with the filament. My only problem is the tiny spools. Until you get about half an inch into the spools, the filament is so close to the edges of the spool that it will almost always pop off of the spool and knot up on the Replicator. I'm building a rig to re-spool the filament onto empty makerbot spools. I did it by hand with one spool and it worked great, but that's too much like real work.  :)

[John D'Ausilio]

I also did the repraper thing, both ABS and PLA including conductive,
transparent, and glow in the dark .. very fast shipping and came out
to around $30/Kg shipped for 6Kg. I like the purple ABS, and I've been
printing the "transparent" PLA (which looks to me like "natural" from
other vendors). Both have very consistent diameter, right at 1.74 or
1.75 every time and seem to work well so far ..

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "MakerBot Operators" group.
> To view this discussion on the web visit
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/makerbot/-/5ASXgRzTWRIJ.
>
> To post to this group, send email to make...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> makerbot+u...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at
> http://groups.google.com/group/makerbot?hl=en.

[Robert Bonenfant]

Thanks for the input im gonna order a roll and see how it looks and works - Then ill place a larger order 

On Monday, October 22, 2012 8:44:51 AM UTC-4, Robert Bonenfant wrote:

[fluxline]

I would make sure you inspect every inch of the filamant before using it though.  I had some filamant from china that had seeds or something in it, and blocked the nozzle. Not many, about 8 in 100m roll.  It's easy to clip out here and there, but who knows what else is in it so I trashed the whole roll.  Bought it from a local supplier that sources from China, I got no reply from the vendor when asking for a solution and I can assume they knew of the problem.

[Laird Popkin]

I've been buying filament from China, from a supplier of ABS and PLA that seems to print quite nicely. When you buy in volume the pricing is very good, but there's no way that I can use it all myself. :-) If there's anyone in the South Florida area (I'm near Fort Lauderdale) who's interested, I'm happy "reselling" a few extra spools at my cost. Or elsewhere, if you don't mind paying for shipping. If interested, contact me at laird at popk dot in.

[Darrell jan]

Steve,

I've bought PLA and ABS from Octave on Amazon. At 32/kg including shipping, it's pretty close to the price from reprap. So far I've only used the PLA, and this is my only PLA experience, but it seems to work fine. The ABS seems OK from just looking at the spool. You do need to print out a different spool holder; see Thingiverse for designs.

I looked at what Makerware sells--all their PLA is either out of stock or requires 30 day notice. Pretty surprising since the new Rep2 is PLA only. I've been wondering about Amazon's Jet and Online Filament too, since there are so few reviews.

Darrell

On Saturday, October 27, 2012 11:45:17 AM UTC-7, Steve wrote:

Has anyone used the PLA 1.75mm filament that Amazon sells on a replicator or Replicator 2? 

I am not familiar with the suppliers. It looks like you can either get PLA filament on Amazon from 'Jet' or 'Online Filament'. I had not heard of either of them before.

What brands of filament have you had good results with on the Replicator 2?

Thanks,

Steve

On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 3:34:43 AM UTC-7, Kirpa Gulati wrote:

Would it be possible for any of the people who've had good experience with their Chinese suppliers post a link or a reference to the suppliers site?? I'm sure it would help me and many others who are looking for more cost effective alternates..

Thanks!

Kirpa S G

[Laird Popkin]

I have been pretty happy with Esun. Their prices are good if you order 8 or 16 kg (1 kg spools). Quality is a bit random, but it's fine for "day to day" prints, if you have a spring tensioned extruder.

- Laird Popkin

Sent from my iPhone. Apologies in advance for typo's.

On Apr 24, 2013, at 8:07 PM, Diego Seminario <proy...@protstudio.com> wrote:

Hey bro, im in the same situation... do you tried the filaments?? im loking some in alibaba.com they sell ones in 14kg per roll

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "MakerBot Operators" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/makerbot/TozvOCsgizI/unsubscribe?hl=en-US.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to makerbot+u...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

[Bryon Miller]

I buy a lot of merchandise from China.  I would not purchase something like this from them because there's no quality control.  It's very possible you could be given weedwacker twine and that's just because they have terrible quality control out there.  It's all about finding a good seller.  I would use Rainbot3d here, if you buy 8 or more spools, it's $28 per spool free shipping.  Otherwise it's $30 per spool plus $5 shipping.

On Monday, October 22, 2012 5:44:51 AM UTC-7, Robert Bonenfant wrote: