I got my Arnitel, flexible filament roll 1.75mm, 0.75kg, white yesterday together with my spare parts (2 new extruders sets)
My Experience so far with the flexible Arnitel: Absolut great.
I dont' have my printer that long and I am still a bit fighting with several issues and experimenting and improveing.
Forexample the normal green PLA I have to print with 240deg but with that high temperatur it comes out perfectly. Sort of strange but it is like that.
The normal white PLA I can only print when I reduce the retraction from 1.5mm to 0.5mm and after the Job is done it ALWAYS clogs the extruder. Whereas I can extrude it at 190 deg it also screams for higher temp.
Unfortunatly at higher temps white PLA starts to behave very very bad (truns brown and clogs the extruder very bad)
The Arnitel, flexible filament so far never cloged my old extruder no matter how I stopped and it's the same extruder that always cloged with the white PLA which is a big big positiv experience.
It extrudes with very well flow/stream on 220 and 240 deg. A bit too well.. the first time that I see that I have to reduce the temperature due to small material bumps at certain spots like an material overflow.
I just have a run at 200 deg now which so far looks great better than the 220 and 240 deg sample. less or now bumps and still no flow problems.
The surface it produces looks smooth, smoother than the normal PLA. The normal quality 0.2mm layer Arnitel print almost looks like a high quality normal PLA 0.1mm print.
I had to re-adjust my Z-Axis since the wobbeling became a dominat ugly surface quality killer now.
I believe my Z-Axis spindle isn't the most stright because I couldn't find a motor-top adjustment that had worked.
However I found a perfect solution for this:
I losened the Top completly the way that it gives in into the wobbeling (also the screw to the frame). My Z-Axis is now hold by the motor below and the nut in the Z-Bearing only. That eleminated any wobbling of the printing table completly!!! So if you have a bad Z-Axis spindle like me.. ..that's what helps perfect.
Arnitel seems to hold less well on the bed. It ripped my first part off during printing..not sure if the material shrinks a bit. I now print with 65 degree bed and with raft. (before I only used support)
The support is harder to remove due to the flexible nature you can not break it of. Of course you can rip it off more easy but there is more support material that keeps sticking on your part which you have to remove.
You have to pay attention to not rip out strings of your parts.
The extruder bolt for the filament feeding I had to tighten (3/4 turn) that it feeded well.
The flow has more difficult to stop..during printing it always makes the small thin wires/string this with 0.4mm retraction and with 0.8mm...maybe I have to go back to 1.5mm here ..dunno I will see.
The bad points:
- The filament spool has a larger hole than the normal so you have to adapt your selfmade spool holders.
- The filament is very expensive.
So my Conclusion
I think the Arnitel flexible filament is a very great filament. So far I love it.
For my tests I printed a ball and its like a bit harder rubber ball.
Also interesting if you strech the original filament it tightens to a thin see through string that is very though.. I couldn't rip it apart by hand. I used it to bind some printer cables together where the normal cable-binder looks ugly.
