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Flex-it! Nylon 3D Printing is Here (Pre-Order that is)

Thursday, December 13, 2012 7:50

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(Before It's News)

taulman-618-nylon-6

Nylon, it’s wonderful stuff. A silky fabric when weaved or a flexible polymer when moulded. Reach out with your hands and chances are you will touch something Nylon (Warning: Solidsmack is not responsible for any injury, due to electric fan or angry, nylon-collered Wombats). Oh, you have a 3D Printer next to your computer? And there’s no nylon? Well fret no more, Nylon printing is here for all you Reprappers/Makerboteurs.

Teaching an old plastic new tricks

A well-known Instructablist and Reprapper Taulmann has been experimenting with various different co-polymers mixtures with Nylon. Nylon alone is quite sexy, as you men and women can attest to. But, for 3D printing, you need to add the right ratio of other materials to Nylon to reduce it’s melting point, sharpen its glass transition point and most importantly, reduce delamination.

In his search for the perfect Nylon, Taulman tested:

17 total co-polymer combinations with 6 base nylon variants
3 Line draw/extrusion methods
3 pH combinations
1,400+ delamination tests
8 Chemical degradation tests
100′s of 3D Printer certification part tests
100′s of temperature tests
1000′s of feet of line from 2.1mm to 3.4mm
17 Color Dye tests

… and broke …

3 NEMA 23′s, 2 NEMA 17′s Stepper Motors
1 Wades “Gear Set” on the REPRAP – Replaced w/nylon gears
14 Nozzles mostly on the 2BEIGH3
3 “X” Belts and 1 “Y” Belt mostly on the 2BEIGH3
3 Idler Pulleys mostly on the 2BEIGH3
4 Heater Resistors on the REPRAP – changed to cartridge
1 Power Supply on the Prusa
4 Stepper Cooling Fans – 3 on the 2BEIGH3 and 1 on the Prusa

That sir, is a commendable job. Luckily he has a machine that can repair itself – mostly.

What can you Print with it?

Really awesome stuff – check out the videos!