WAAM printing has its limitations but i still feel like it’s probably the lowest barrier to entry as far as pure metal printing goes. That’s got to be doable for under $10K by now, right? If you janked it together yourself? Plus below that there’s still always lost PLA casting, or sintering composite metal/plastic filaments. Maybe I’m way off base though, who knows.

It doesn’t seem to be, or if it is, it’s in a very different way. A lot of other materials seem to get more brittle in humidity, but I haven’t noticed that with PHA.

We’ve tried every brand I can find, like Colorfabb AllPHA, Beyond Plastic BioPHA, and Bosk Regen. We usually order directly from them since it’s hard to find in a distributor, but we’re in the Northeast U.S.A., so it’d be really nice if anyone was making it around here.

That’s just if you’re having too much trouble with warping, which we generally don’t, and it doesn’t apply to perimeters or top layers, just bottom layers and infill. We’ve printed plenty of parts near solid with no issue at all. In addition, PHA is inherently more durable than PLA anyway.

Depends on how thick it is and what biome it degrades in, but in my compost it seems pretty comparable to wood?

LOL I thought the same thing! Santa ḩ̶͑͠ͅȕ̸̢̫͐͒n̴̠̍ḡ̷̢̼͈͊̌͠é̶̡̘͚͔͛̕r̸̘̱̄̇́ś̴̽͜

Ohhh sure yeah, up front it does! There’s definitely some work to get it figured out the first time, that’s very true. It took us a while to iron out the settings. Once you get that stuff worked out though, from then on it’s pretty smooooooth.

I disagree, but sometimes… difficult things are worth doing? It’s not like we randomly decided to use it for no reason afterall.

Oh, I should also have mentioned in the original post! Most of these pics/vids are of stuff printed on a low end printer with 0.6mm nozzle, not using high resolution settings. It’s all just stuff our patrons have requested, who are more interested in getting it soon than it looking SUPER nice. It can absolutely be printed with super high detail in mind instead.

The thing about the warping is, while most settings are nearly exactly the same as with PLA, there’s a few things that have to be the exact opposite. Once you get done fiddling with it, it actually prints like a dream. We even use it as our default material unless somebody requests otherwise. If it was unprintable, we wouldn’t be able to do that. Some stuff we’ve learned:

• Bed temp turned completely off!
• Use a fresh layer of a good 3d printing adhesive. (If your adhesive is heat activated, 35C should roughly be enough to activate without messing with the PHA)
• If you have an enclosure, open it up as much as possible. I noticed I have a lot more warping in my enclosed printer than my unenclosed one.
• Try out a few different fan settings. I personally have better luck with less fan.
• Put a big giant brim on it. Maybe even one made out of a different material than the object itself, if you’ve got dual extrusion.
• The higher the infill percentage and the more solid bottom layers there are, the more it will warp. So avoid that where possible.
• Most slicers probably already print the first layer at a chunkier line width than the nozzle size, but feel free to jack up the line width even more.
• Set the first layer pattern to concentric or Hilbert curve, evens out the distribution of forces that cause warping.
• Finally, if all else fails… Rotate the object until it’s sitting on a really impractical edge, then print it in sort of a “cradle” of support material. BVOH or PVA if you’ve got it. Basically make as little of it touch the build plate as possible? I don’t like this option because it requires dual extrusion and is pretty wasteful.

That all probably sounds pretty extreme but honestly these are worst case scenarios? Normally it just works. Maybe part of this also comes down to the fact that all the people making it have been refining their product for a while now to deal with the notorious warpy-ness, so it’s just not as bad as it used to be. We’ve used every brand we can find, Colorfabb’s AllPHA, Beyond Plastic’s BioPHA, Bosk’s Regen, they’re all pretty comparable. Here’s a vid of another PHA print in progress right now, one where we really didn’t even follow most of those tips above, and it’s going fine. It’s the second one of these.

What if you printed it flat as a rectangle and then rolled it up and sealed the edges? Seems like it’d print better that way, no retractions, no bridging, no fragile areas of like ten 1mm-width layers stacked on top each other.

A lot of public libraries offer access to ReferenceUSA through your library card. I vaguely remember that queries are pretty customizable on there, and exportable to various formats. Despite the generic name, it’s specifically for businesses. Would that work?