So I’ve had a few weeks of printing now with 100% reused PA11. Gotta say, it’s a lot better than I thought it would be. Part strength is great and quality did suffer slightly yes, but I’ve had zero failures and critically, the parts are testing at more or less full strength for what I’m doing.
Anyone else got any experience with trying this out?
Not pa11 but pa 12 same results here, cosmetic defects but major underdosing issues at 8-9 hours. I’m still collecting powder to run some tests in the future at different refresh rates.
Hey @Mario_Martinez and @CJay9209
Glad you’re seeing good results even when using 100% reused powder, this is definitely a good way of making use of accumulated powder.
We’ve also seen a couple customers (and I’ve even tried that myself once) to use old powder in injection molding processes. For a little while we had a lever-operated one in the Berlin office and I injected powder into a Rigid 10k printed mold, which worked okay-ish, unfortunately I didn’t have a lot of time to develop this process further.
A thing I’d advise is to maybe try to count the cycles your powder undergoes in the printer. Of course you’re “refreshing” your powder by readding other “old” powder, which has maybe not had as many cycles, but very broadly speaking the powder starts to degrade quite a bit after a certain amount of times going through the print process.
Kind regards,
Jakob