Favorite filament so far?

Price wise the alloy 910 is probably your best bet.
The other choices are more. None of which is really as cheap as the bottom end PLA.
<shrug> a small oiler is not like a big deal. You can make them small enough to wrap up with the spool.
(http://community.robo3d.com/index.php?threads/yet-another-oiler.6245/)

Solved every last problem I had with PLA. I burn through a lot of the cheap stuff.

 

PETG is a bit more, like alloy 910

 

Yea, but I am usually not concerned about the color.
Have airbrush

 

Can't Alloy 910 accept acid based dyes after printing?

 

A LOT of trial and error.

My advice is get a good brush and a good compressor then a lot of scrap wood/metal and practice
My son does a lot better work with the airbrush so I usually take the lazy route and hand it to him ...

 

Airbrushing is easy. I have two. The key as with all painting is surface prep, then learn to move in sweeping continuous motion. No starting and stopping. Learn to paint almost dry, then whatever falls on your table can be brushed away. Airbrushes are not intended to put on heavy coats of paint. Lighter the better. If you want heavy, put away your airbrush and run down to Lowes for a can of Krylon.

This is off-topic, so let's get back to filament discussion. I have some Alloy 910 in my Amazon shopping cart just waiting to see if I need anything else in the next day or two.

 

Agreed and you probably need to run the paint a little thinner than you might think.
Sweet thing is how you can get exactly that perfect shade...

 

Print slower than PLA and 230°C may not be quite enough. I am printing all colors at of eSUN PETG at 238°C. Anything over about 240°C and you start to get crystalization. It doesn't hurt the print strength but it clouds up the print reducing its translucency. Under about 235°C and it just isn't liquid enough to go down smoothly. YMMV.

 

Yes.

It is far more rigid than regular nylons (or bridge).

 

Don't forget that Alloy 910 shrinks a lot. When I printed my Bondtech extruder case I eventually had to scale up my print 10% in all directions in order for it to fit right. Compared to ABS 1-2% or PET .5-1%, that is one heck of a lot of shrinkage.

I am sure 10% was an outlier, most models won't shrink that much but it is significant.

 

@WheresWaldo I think you must have had some user error in there somewhere. There aren't outliers. Shrinkage is a material property.
Nylon shrinks a bit more than ABS (which will be at the 1-2% range). So, we're talking closer to 2%, maybe pushing 2.5. 910 is a lower shrinkage / warp formulation. If you had 10% shrinkage, you wouldn't have a chance of keeping your prints on the buildplate.

 

I did not have 10% shrinkage with the Alloy 910. In fact, I did not notice any on the first spool, but it was mostly smaller models.
That would have been a non-starter... I couldn't tolerate that much (or certainly wouldn't).

Interesting though, perhaps a bad batch? You should contact the seller about maybe swapping that spool.

 

It very well could have been the model, I hate working with just STL files, since there is so little you can do with them other than some small scaling and slicing. I will double check my measurements, I am about to print the Hercustruder in Alloy 910, I will post how that turned out.

I might have misplaced a decimal point somewhere in my memory.