Anybody have FPS files for PA11 Carbon Fiber? It seems this needs some more love. Parts warp very easily.
We pretty much just copied the PA12 bed and wall heat settings over and have gotten much better results. Is there a reason PA11 CF seems to not have any work done on it?
Nylon 11 CF TAPPCOOL 1218.fps (57.6 KB)
Probably material price, and the fact nitrogen is needed to ensure good results.
Keep in mind that minor changes take great effect, surface armor in particular can help a lot with surface defects.
Tried increasing surface armor and strength, would end up with much faster powder degradation. Found increasing the upper/lower wall and build platform heat times helped with warping. Would still like to see some more tuning from Formlabs as this very much seems like an experimental material.
I experienced orange peel for months and over 10 kg of wasted powder from unusable parts rejected by my customer. Formlabs reponse was to run bed testing and either increase or decrease bed temp which never solved my issues.
The other “solution” was to add more new powder to the mixture until orange peel dissapeared.
In the end after trial and error and a fellow user recommendation of increasing Surface armor power by 20% my problem was solved, yes you experience faster degradation but it’s better than failed unusable parts, after that I tuned my profile to a “sweet spot” where powder is easy to remove just like stock settings but orange peel is a thing of the past. I can even run completely used powder with no issues more than underdosing but no orange peel anymore.
My take on this is that Formlabs creates settings to provoke this issues and keep selling material to “correct” them because it indeed works. But they just don’t take the tame to really work with customers in order to find a SOLUTION to the issues. Since I got the machine( pre owned Fuse 1) a low pressure alert is present and the solution is to leave it like that because they don’t have a solution the previous user also had this issue and the response was the exact same.
You’re using CF? We’re fixing our orange peel problem and leaky parts with a vapor smoother. Had low pressure error on our first machine; fixed by always vacuuming the intake filter.
I can’t because fuse1 10 w can’t process this material, I had only worked with 12 GF and I haven’t tuned my profile yet.
Thanks for sharing your feedback! When tuning our material settings, our team aims for a refresh rate and print parameters that optimize output across a variety of parts. That also means that the setting might not be ideal for each individual part geometry, so adjusting the settings (e.g. bed temperature, surface armor or refresh rate) can lead to better results for specific prints.
Thank you for sharing which adjustments worked well for you! Since these tweaks are often case-specific, such community examples are a huge help for everyone.
Very nice way to reply, and it exposes the fact that support is not willing to work with customers to achieve good results.
My tuned settings are applied to all kind of parts, since we are a CM we produce many different geometries. The orange peel effect is very common with thick parts or large surfaces and the only solution support provides is to refresh the powder…