Great excitement here as I finish my first ever print with PolyFlex from polymakr. I’m amazed it worked with so little trouble. Had a little jam when I tried to load the filament using the standard PLA settings from the LCD, but other than that all I did was to slow down the print speed to 15mm/s min and 30mm/s max. The surface finish is very good indeed, once you remove the ‘fluff’ or very fine ‘hair’ that seems to accumulate over it. It does string quite badly, so it perhaps not for very fine details (not without a fair bit of clean up, at least). But on the vertical parts of this print, you can’t see the layers and this was printed at 0.2mm.
As a new material, PolyFlex is very interesting, but what it is not is a soft rubber. It’s more like a flexible polyurethane (as used for plastic kayaks). It flexes and bends, but it’s not rubbery. It feels tough.
Given the little jam I had at the extruder (nothing at the nozzle yet), I suspect it would be pretty challenging to print a genuine soft rubber type filament. PolyFlex is more a flexible plastic, it’s certainly much stronger than the soft rubber filaments. For example, you can bend the tail part of this fish in double no problem (the material recovers its original shape quite slowly), but you would struggle to snap or pull off the tail part. Pulling it that direction it barely stretches. If you hold the fish horizontally by its tail, the weight will make the tail bend. Hold it by its head horizontally, and the tail stays straight.
Anyhow, it’s one more feather in our bow, or the bow of the Vertex, or whatever the correct metaphor is! Good to know there’s one relatively straight forward flexible filament we can use.
