Nylon Taulman Bridge - Excellent stuff :)

I picked up a roll of Taulman Bridge from Printed Solid the other week. Today I ran a few tests using the old Hexagon hotend since I'm still waiting for something from elsewhere before installing the E3DV6 upgrade. I must say that I'm extremely pleased with this material.

Although I'd been cautioned that nylon is a very different material from the PLA I've been using up to this point, the differences in setup aren't as bad as I'd imagined they might be.

I use Cura, and the settings I used were:

* Extruder temperature: 255C (PLA was 195C)
* Bed temperature: 52C (Was unheated for PLA)
* Print speed: 40mm/sec (Same as I was using for PLA)
* Retract: 5mm (I'd been using 4.5 for PLA)
* Cooling fan: Enabled, full on at 0.5mm (Was disabled for PLA)

For what it's worth, some time back I changed the acceleration settings since the printer was somewhat noisy in operation. This not only greatly reduces the noise but somewhat improves the print quality as well, not to mention reducing wear and tear on the printer. I did this in the startup gcode via M201 X1000 Y1000 Z100 E2000

Although for PLA I've been using hairspray for bed preparation with excellent results I've read that this doesn't work well for nylon, so I used glue stick in this case.

It's been quite humid here and I did notice at various points during the prints that I was getting little bursts of steam, however this didn't noticeably affect anything.

The DePrime test object printed beautifully, without the corner protrusions on the cubes that PLA had left which I've remarked on elsewhere. I then tried some other objects and found that overall the nylon yields much nicer prints than the PLA was providing. Although a slight degree of lift occurred at the extremes of some objects, this was easily corrected simply by printing with a raft.

I'm quite confident that I'll be buying more of this material.