Hello, 3D Printing Friends! I've been having some trouble with this rainbow
PLA filament from Eryone. What kind of trouble? Well, stick around and we'll get
into it, right after this. I'm Bryan, and you... are watching BV3D!
Hi everyone, welcome back. Also, forgive the mess. So, I want to start this out by saying I
wanted to like this filament. I REALLY wanted to like it! I know a lot of you
have been having great success with Eryone Rainbow PLA filament. You tweet
out print after print, and I gotta say they look AMAZING!
And based on that, I bought a spool of it on Amazon. I wanted to test it, and do a
filament review, and show off some cool prints. So I got a spool of that Eryone
Rainbow PLA, and I had failure after failure with it.
I couldn't print my usual test suite without one model or another failing
miserably. I took measurements with my digital
calipers and I found that the filament diameter was out of spec. The label on
the spool says it's got a ±0.02mm tolerance, but the
listing on Amazon says that's 0.05mm. Well, taking the larger of
those two tolerance values, this 1.75mm filament should never drop
below 1.7 or go above 1.8 millimeters in diameter. But the diameter on it would
frequently drop to 1.67mm, which is outside of
that more generous ± 0.05mm tolerance. It also had spots
where it was so thick it jammed in the printer. Well, since it was outside the
stated tolerance on the Amazon listing, I took advantage of Amazon's return policy
tagged it as defective, and exchanged it for another spool. With all the nice
prints I was seeing on Twitter, I figured I just got a bad run of filament,
so I'd try again. I also chatted with Aaron Lau, one of Eryone's representatives on
Facebook. He claimed that measuring filament diameter with digital calipers
wasn't accurate, and the only way to get an accurate measurement was to use a
micrometer. So I bought a micrometer. Well, the second spool has the same kind of
issues. I tried printing a temperature tower
with the new spool on a different printer, and the filament jammed. So
there's the printer, doing what my friend Mr. Butram calls the "air guitar" version
of 3d printing. I admit, I got frustrated, and I tweeted
about the problem. And then Eryone's Aaron Lau released a "How to Measure
Filament with a Thickness Gauge" video, which you should probably watch, and I'll
link to it in the description. So instead of a filament review, I ended up making
more of a filament measuring video. That's something I didn't want to have
to do. What I WANTED to do was make a video showing off the filament that
everybody on Twitter was having such a good time with. The PLA material itself,
and the color transitions, are GREAT! The problem is the inconsistent filament
diameter, especially the areas where the filament has thick blobs and jams in the
printer. So, having said all that, let's have a look at the 1.75 mm
Eryone Rainbow PLA.
This is the filament that I had shown a picture of on Twitter.
Let's zoom in on that a bit. It's kind of got this weird inclusion in it
here. That is the kind of thing that causes the printer to jam, because this
is bigger then will fit through the hot end on the printer. Taking a simple
measurement of this, zero that out, put that right in the jaws, bring it down
gently, then we have a 2.02 (more or less) mm measurement of
that lump. What do we get if we try that with a micrometer? I'll bring that out,
and bring it back in... gently... and I will do about three clicks on this little
adjuster knob here. And that provides the same amount of pressure every time.
I'm just gonna set this down here. I'll keep that like that, and turn this ever so
slightly. One, two, three. Then we can lock this caliper...
...or this micrometer.
And that's a 2.03 mm lump. Unlock this; release the pressure on it.
Then I've got my replacement spool here, of the Eryone filament. And as I run my
fingers along here, I can feel that there is a lump right here. I will mark that
area with a Sharpie™ on either side of it, there, and there. Now, I don't know if we
can really see the lump. It's like right here in the middle. A little high point, a little
extra thickness there. I'm gonna cut this segment off, just so that it's a
little easier to work with. We'll set this segment with the lump right down here.
We'll get that out of the way.
We got our area with a lump in it.
So what do we get when we measure that lump?
Click click click... there is a 1.9 mm measurement.
Sometimes it's easier to measure with a caliper, you can hold the item. Zero that again.
There we go, that's at zero. Kind of hold the item in that little pinchy part
there. Still, it's about 1.9 mm, which is what I was measuring with the
micrometer, so unless you're trying to get down to the thousandth... thousandthths? of
a millimeter, I would say that you get reasonably accurate results just with a
caliper, at least for the purposes of getting to the hundredth of a millimeter
when you're measuring.
Now, I actually do expect that I'll get a few thumbs down
on this video because a lot of you really like Eryone's filament. And I
want to like it too, and I want to believe they're working to fix these
issues, and maybe in the future they'll have all
this corrected. And when that time comes, I'll test the filament again. And I'll be
able to actually review it, and show it off. For now, I've tried two spools,
ordered about a month apart, and had the same result. What about you?
Have you had problems with Eryone filament, or have you had great success?
Let me know in the comments! Okay, we're pretty much at the end of the episode.
If you made it this far, thanks! And a BIG thanks to all of you who subscribe, like,
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