ADD:NORTH X-PLA – 1.75MM – 2.3KG – BLACK

SPECIFICATIONS

PRINT GUIDE

Temperatures

180-220 degrees in the nozzle and up to 70 degrees on the build plate. There are three primary factors influenced by the temperature:

• Surface. You can achieve more matteness with lower nozzle temp, and vice versa.
• Layer adhesion. Layer adhesion increases with increased temperature. It is usually good for bed adhesion to also print the first layer a bit warmer than the rest of the model, on the nozzle as well as the print bed.
• Flow. With increased temperature, the flow increases (the viscosity decreases). This may have to be compensated with a somewhat increased retraction distance and retraction speed. Conversely, low-temp prints needs a bit less retraction. Always try to use as little retraction (distance and speed) as possible, so it just prevents the stringing you want to get rid of. This is especially important if you print with all-metal hotends.

We recommend you to print a temptower when first using a new material, to find the sweetspot of your printer.

Build plate adhesion

X-PLA is relatively easy to get to stick to most build plates, as long as the build plate is correctly leveld against the nozzle. A correctly leveled build plate when printing X-PLA is close enough for the material to squeeze out on the platform, but not too close so as to prevent the material from extruding at all. First layer height can be increased a bit to make it less sensitive to the leveling. If you need more adhesion, a brim of about 3-5mm is recommended. Surfaces that works well with X-PLA:

• PEI/buildTak: Very good adhesion, even at lower build plate temp or even cold build plate
• Painter’s tape: Good and easy alternative if you do not have PEI or BuildTak.
• Heated glass: Works fine for small-area prints, but big print surfaces might need some help with hair spray or similar to keep the edges down during long prints. Also make sure the room temperature is ambient.

Quality

Quality is a complex area where hardware and slicer have big impact. Every new filament needs in general some tuning to achieve its full potential, usually through printing some calibration models and adjusting iteratively. We have gathered our favourites here.

• Printspeed, flow and layer height: It is easier to get a higher visual quality with lower speeds and lower layer heights, which increases the resolution. Many times, though, it is desireable to produce ones print as fast as possible. The factor that need primary attention when increasing layer height and print speed is nozzle temperature. When the flow through the nozzle increases, there is less time for the plastic to melt, which then requires a somewhat increased temperature to achieve good results. We recommend 60mm/s and 0.15mm layer height with 0.95 extrusion multiplier as a starting point.
• Stringing: Is reduced with increased retraction distance and retraction speed. We recommend about 5mm for bowden and 2mm for direct drive, with a speed of about 30-40mm/s
• Heat creep: If an all-metal hotend is used, retraction needs to be decreased to about 1.5mm for direct drive and about 4mm for bowden. Also, the temperature needs to be increased about 10-15 degrees to avoid cloggs. At high print speeds (about 70-100mm/s), about 230 degrees might be needed. The reason for this is that the PLA creates friction against the metal feeding tube when it abruptly goes from print temp to ambient, which does not happen in a PTFE-tube.