What Materials Process Well W/O Enclosure?

Hi All,

I'm looking at a RepRap system on eBay that I eventually plan to use to print the DBot Core-XY parts which are quite chunky. Other than PLA what materials do people find print well without an enclosure on a PCB heat bed? Build surface will be glass coated with kapton tape.

With my system at work (thingverse Core-XY DBot) I can print PLA fine, but ABS is near impossible for chunky parts and did get PETG to warp, but that was a large part potentially over extruding and with too much infill.

Thanks.

I had my best results with PLA and a 0.6mm volcano nozzle. I don't print on glass, so I can't judge other filaments. I also made a few part from ABS for my DBot, especially the flat ones ( T-connectors and corner brackets ).
My corner brackets made from PLA are spot on and didn't fail for almost a year now. But in the meantime I had bad luck with PLA from east european vendors, so better look for premium stuff.

The D-Bot I built for work was based around parts from an eastern European eBay supplier in PET. What were you're issues with them? Would like to know so I can keep an eye out for them! Some of my parts have cracked a little under tightening but so far not killed anything!

Looking to build my own parts for the home machine just to save a little money and gain experience.

I had good experience with filamentonline.de (Herz-Filament.com) but a few month ago they announced cooperating with an eastern europe partner. ( Poland?) The PLA from there was very brittle and caused several clogged nozzles.

Ah right, filament supplier rather than printed components. Thanks for the warning.

I did at one stage look at how much work these machines would need to do to pay for themselves. Some of the prices that I've seen on ebay and the like must be nearly material only. Biggest cost I could see was operator time until you've done a suitable amount of mods to allow you to leave it running unattended.