welcome back to filament friday. i am hansluther here at cubicity.com. customers often ask us how much they can print with one spoolof filament. unfortunately, there is no simple answer.but in today's video we will look at the main printing parameters influencing how much,or how little, filament will be used. and with the help of our slicing software we'llestimate the required filament for a couple of sample objects. when we talk about filament quantity, we typically measure it by weight. your slicing softwaremay even show you the required amount of material before you beging printing.simplify3d, for example, shows us the "plastic weight" in the "build statistics" window.so how does the software get to this number?
well, the software of course knows the dimensionsof the object and can calculate the required material by volume based on the print settings,such as infill percentage or extrusion width. but, in order to calculate the weight it alsoneeds to know the density of the filament. so what is the density of 3d printing filament?well, let's start with the most common materials: abs is 1.04 grams per cubic centimeter andpla is 1.25. of course the density is not something that'stypically shown on the specifications sheets of printing filament. but you can help yourselfin several different ways. for any common industrial polymer you caneasily find its density just by searching the web. nylon, for example, is 1.15 gramsper cubic centimeter and searching for petg
would reveal its density of 1.38.when working with composite filaments you could get the densities of its componentsand estimate the mix, which should get you close enough in most cases.for our excelfil aluminum for instance, we could take the densities of aluminum and plaand assume a mix of roughly 30/70 to get to a density of 1.69.once we have the density for our filament, we can enter it into the slicing software.in simplify3d i go over to the "other" tab and enter the density right here. note thatyou can also enter the price of your filament to let simplify3d calculate the cost of yourprints. we do get asked a lot: "how many meters orfeet are on a single spool of filament?"".
once you have the density of your filament,you can also calculate how long it is. we'll start with the density, which we knowis 1.25 grams per cubic centimeter for pla. the volume per gram is then simply the reverse,so 1 divided by 1.25 equals 0.8 cubic centimeter per gram. since we have a 1 kilogram spool,we multiply this by 1,000 to get to a volume of 800 cubic centimeter per kilogram.lastly, for the length we of course need to take the filament diameter into account andcalculate the area of the circle that is the 2-dimensional cut-through of our filament.at 1.75mm, this is 2.4 square mm or 0.024 square centimeter. we then divide our totalvolume by this area and get to 33,333 centimeters or about 333 meters.similarly, for 2.85mm the circle's area is
0.064 square centimeter and the spool lengthis then only about 125 meters. so filament is sold by weight, but how muchfilament is on a spool? well, there is no single standard when it comes to spool weight.that said, there are a few sizes you'll commonly see. 1 kilogram or 2.2 pounds is still thedefacto standard for abs and pla. rarely you'll see a 2lb spool.for smaller spools, we often see 500g, 750g and 1 pound spools.in the end you'll have tp carefully check the spool weight when purchasing your filament.sometimes sellers will not immediately show the weight, as in this example where you haveto click dropdown to see that the large spools in fact weighs just 2 pounds.to avoid such pitfalls we recommend that you
convert the price of each spool in dollarsper lb or dollars per kg when trying to compare prices.now let's take a look at some key settings that determine how much filament is used ina print. there are 3 areas to consider: extrusion, layer and infill.before we dive in, please keep in mind that we are only talking about material usage today.changing any of these settings can also influence the quality and duration of the print.typically you will not look at them in isolation, rather you'll consider the impact on materialquantity, print quality and print duration when optimizing your settings.i'll use simplify3d to demonstrate this, but most slicers have similar settings that youcan tweak.
your extrusion width and multiplier effectevery line printed and thus effect material usage in the same magnitude. increasing themultiplier by 10% to 1.1, will result in an extra 10% of filament used for the print.how much the layer settings effect the quantity of material you will need for the print variesgreatly between objects. adding solid layers will naturally increasethe filament used, but if your object has hundreds of layers and a very small footprintit will be a very small change in relation to the overall material requirementtypically you will reduce the number of solid layers when you increase the layer heightand there is no significant change in material usage.lastly, the infill. depending on the object
this is often the quickest way to reduce theamount of filament needed for a print. it's important to keep in mind that largeinfill numbers of 40% and more are typically only required if a) the object has a largearea of infill that would otherwise become too weak or b) you simply want a heavier object.let's now look at a couple of example objects and how many of each we can print with 1kgof pla. we'll start with an nfl football. first let’s take a look at a high qualityprint. infill is at 40% and layer height is 0.2mm. and, it turns out we could only printabout 60% of the football with a single spool. now let's see if we can tweak the settingsto print the entire football with a single spool. at a reduced infill of 20% and an increasedlayer height of 0.3mm, we now need only about
880g or just under 2 pounds of filament. stilla lot, but a lot less than before. so you can see with an object like a football thathas a large open space inside, reducing the infill percentage has almost a one-to-oneeffect on the filament quantity required to print the object.for our small test print object i am using 3dbenchy, which is one of my favorite testprints. it measures about 2.5 by 1.25 by 2 inches.using the same high quality settings as before, we can print about 60 of our little 3dbenchieswith a single spool of pla. switching to our reduced infill settings,we now get about 73 boats out of the same spool. so just an 13 additional objects, orabout 20% more. this small object has very
little infill compared to solid layers andwalls, so reducing its infill has a much smaller impact.we could reduce the top or bottom solid layers or tweak the wall thickness to improve thisa little bit, but the impact will always be fairly small unless you really are willingto sacrifice quality. so, besides knowing your slicer settings,it's also important to consider the object you're printing and checking the impact ofyour changes using the print preview function
how fast does a 3d printer print,of your software.and that's it for today. as always be sure to subscribe to our youtube channel and followus on twitter to be sure you don't miss any future episodes of filament friday here atcubicity.com.
thanks for watching and have a great week.
