Makerbot 5th Gen PETG filament roll holder and machine settings

[Joe Paladin]

I am a mechanical engineer, and very familiar with scientific method. If you are given pot metal to work with I do not care how much you try you are not going to make Gold jewelry.

If you are printing with PLA plastic that is just not a professional thermoplastic more for toys.  After buying my Makerbot 5th gen and realizing it was only intended to print PLA I did a lot of research and testing.

The end result in my opinion is PLA sucks and ESun PETG is amazing using the right machine settings.  Fortunately the 5th gen is capable of printing PETG perfectly without a heated bed, I print just on blue painters tape.

The PETG filament comes on a spool that does not fit into the Makerbot, and you need a well designed filament roll holder not something generic on ebay sitting on roller bearings with no filament tube guide.

Also you need the right machine settings to print PETG and you probably do not want to go through all the trial and error I went through even if you are a mechanical engineer like myself.

It takes 11 hours to print the components in PETG.  In PETG you can squeeze the locking tabs together 1,000s of times with no change, printed in PLA the first time I squeezed them together one side snapped off. PLA is to brittle and not strong.

My design is similar to what is on the machine sliding the Esun PETG spool over flexing plastic that locks the spool of filament in place in a rectangular wood frame with filament tube guide.

The machine settings are on a USB drive.  My email is joepa...@hotmail.com   For $99 plus $20 shipping I could make one for you.

Sincerely,

Joe Paladin

[TobyCWood]

Too bad you did not do the research before buying the Repg5! 11 hours on this machine is less then 4 hours on almost any other.