i’m tom and today i’m going to talk aboutpolycarbonate. now, polycarbonate, or short / pc, is one of the highest-performing plasticsout there, both in terms of strength and temperature resistance. it’s also optically clear, whichmakes it ideal for things like shatterproof sunglasses, face shields, protective glassesor even as a component in bullet-proof windows. it’s also often used in composites whereglass or carbon fibers are added to make the material even stronger and stiffer. for 3dprinting, you’ll probably be using polycarbonate without fiber additions, but just by itselfi, polycarboneate is already a pretty impressive material. it is a bit stiffer than abs, butnot quite as hard as pla; it has an enormous amount of layer bonding and it takes way higherforces to break a printed part than one made
from “normal†plastics. even getting thebrim off of your print can be quite challenging. now, polycarbonate isn’t a new material,richrap has been printing polycarbonate since 2011, but it isn’t really popular, yet,either. and that has couple of reasons. first of all, i already mentioned that it is verytemperature-stable with a glass transition temperature of about 150â°c, compared to 100â°for abs or just above 60â° for pla, but that also means that you’ll have to print polycarbonateat much higher temperatures. you can extrude it as cold as 260â°c, but at that temperature,it has almost no layer adhesion. so realistically, you’ll be printing polycarbonate beyond300â°c, which simply isn’t something that normal hotends that use ptfe or peek in theheated parts / can handle. i mostly used 315â°c.
you will need an all-metal hotend and possiblya specialized thermistor or another way of measuring the hotend’s temperature sinceeven the stock thermistor of the e3d v6 is only rated for up to 300â°c. now, the thermistorprobably won’t spontaneously combust at 301â°c, but it will have a reduce accuracyand a shorter lifespan at those temperatures. / you might also want to retighten your nozzleonce the hotend is up to temp for the first time to keep if from oozing out in the wrongspots. the other thing that i’ve found extremelychallenging was getting my prints to stick to the build plate. i tried glue stick, kapton,pet tape and abs glue slurry stuff, and the only ones of those that worked somewhat decentlywere pet tape and, to a lesser degree, kapton
tape. bed temperatures of 120 or 140â°c madevery little difference, and while smaller and weaker prints like this octopus workedpretty well on pet tape at 125â°c, stronger parts like the formlabs rook detached mid-printevery single time. kapton has a bit of an advantage here since the part stays stuckto the tape while the tape itself lifts off of the bed. but neither are ideal. and that,i think is the biggest downside to polycarbonate. of course, you could use a polycarbonate sheetand print onto that, but to keep your parts from permanently bonding to the sheet, you’dhave to apply the exact right amount of hairspray or some other release agent to it and stillwouldn’t have a surface that reliably works each time.one other thing that was quite nasty about
polycarbonate was the smell. because it smellslike sweet burnt rubber and, going by what i’ve read about it so far, also releasesquite a lot of particles into the air, so it’s probably not something you want tobe in the same room with while it’s printing. you should also open your windows. even ifit’s cold outside. polycarbonate seems to require a minimum speedto print well. if you go too slow, it will start bubbling up and turn your print fromclear to opaque white. on the other hand, if you print too fast, the filament mightkink in the extruder and the layers of the finished print will have less adhesion toeach other. but a slighly larger extrusion width can help with that, especially for thingslike vases.
and while the acetone vapor method works prettywell for smoothing out abs prints, you will need need mek to dissolve or smooth polycarbonate,and that is basically a stronger and nastier version of acetone. acetone by itself willinstantly make polycarbonate brittle instead of dissolving it. the thing is, though, youwill rarely need to smooth out polycarbonate prints since the prints just by themselveswill usually look very, very clean without any post-processing.now, this might all sound like polycarbonate is something that you wouldn’t really wantto use. and it’s true, it’s not ever going to replace abs or pla as a daily driver filament.but, just like nylon, it is a material that is well suited for special applications, especiallyfor those where nylon is too soft. i’ll
be using it for 1:10th scale rc car spares,where using printed abs parts instead of the original composite parts just doesn’t feelquite right. because of its neat optical properties, polycarbonate is also well-suited for glowythings, but pet filaments like colorfabb xt or taulman t-glase are probably the betterchoice for those things since pet is / actually printable. so it really boils down to high-tempor high-strength parts, and ever there there’s some competition. taulman are now offeringtritan filament, and from what i’ve seen about that, it seems to be a very promisingplastic that is much more printable than polycarbonate while only lacking the extreme temperatureresistance. i’m still waiting to get some tritan and i’ll post a comparison once i’vetried it out.
so there you have it! polycarbonate rightnow is both a solution and source of problems, but it is a pretty neat material for the rightapplications. and it’s not even that much more expensive than regular filament.so, thank you to e3d for sending me a roll of polycarbonate a while back, i just nowgot around to trying it out. if you want to purchase some, i’ve put some links in thedescription where you can do just that. before you ask, no i cannot share the filefor the formlabs rook, that file was give to me so that i’d able to run some directcomparisons to the sample part they are handing out. i was going to do a quick mechanicaltest in the same way i did for pla, abs, nylon
cheap 3d printing service uk,and the formlabs part in the plastic destructionvideo, but i just didn’t manage to print
a complete rook without it detaching fromthe build plate. so that’s it for today, please do not hesitateto use those like, share and subscribe buttons on the youtube page. and as always, thanksfor watching! see you next week.
