eSUN 3D Printer Flexible TPE 83A Filament 1.75mm Dimensional Accuracy +/- 0.05mm 1KG (2.2 LBS) Spool 3D Printing Material (WHL #103)
Printer filament. Well, not directly, but in a way.
I guess this could also be a rant since it’s not about the filament itself, but more an issue of packaging. This concerns eSun, which I avoid because of this, but for this very filament, I needed to buy eSun.
eSun makes TPU (they call it TPE, same thing really) filament in 83A shore hardness. I don’t think anyone else does, and very few do similar materials, especially in the 1.75mm DIY filament diameter and not for industrial use in the 3mm realm. The smaller the number, the softer the material is. Usual TPU, say Sunlu, is in the 95A-ish region, which is about as hard as shopping cart wheels. That’s clearly more flexible than typical 3D printing materials like PLA and PETG, but it’s not exactly soft. 83A is more in the region of softer shoe soles, so that’s actually useful for things like gaskets and similar seals where material needs to be squished for fractions of a millimeter. A colleague told me about this, since he’s been using this (and harder TPUs) to create orthopedic tools and is getting into actual custom shoe production.
The point of this post however is packaging – TPU is, like basically all 3D printer filaments, hygroscopic, and it’s both more affected by moisture and more hygroscopic than say PLA. TPU needs to be dried to work properly. Soft TPU, like this eSun stuff, especially needs to be dry in order to print properly, because even in perfect condition it’s a royal pain in the ass to work with. Just check its spaghetti-ness udon-ness in the preview image.
I paid 26.32€ for one kg of this stuff in natural color back in late August (shipped via AliExpress – significantly cheaper than buying it on German Amazon, or eBay, or something).
What type of spool does eSun use for advertising this moisture-sensitive material? Plastic! As they should.
What type of spool does eSun use for actually shipping this moisture-sensitive material? FUCKING RECYCLED CARDBOARD!
Yeah, green environmental fap-fap, you arseholes. Your stupid packaging actually makes the product unusable, since cardboard also holds a lot of water, and you fucktards apparently neither pre-dry that cardboard, nor include enough desiccant to slowly dry it during shipping.
That kilogram of material was moved to a plastic spool, and I printed a terrible benchy with it after like one day of drying in freshly activated silica gel. I also dried the cardboard spool (in the same box), and I noted down the weight of the remaining material including the plastic spool that doesn’t hold any water.
Cardboard spool:
27.08.2024: 147,0g
18.09.2024: 144,6g
29.09.2024: 143.1g
That’s -3.9g or 1/40th of the spool weight. A “fully” (clearly not all water has been removed at this point) dried spool would have been able to remove 4g of water from the TPU material, equal to -0.4% of water content in the material. But it didn’t, because it was never dried properly by eSun.
TPU over the same time scale:
1136g -> 1127g -> 1127g
That’s -9g of water loss within 2-3 weeks of passive drying over silica gel. Given the plastic spool that it is resting on is about 150g, that’s close to one percent of weight loss. Note that it reached final weight pretty quickly, so it’s relatively easy to dry.
So in total, I was able to remove 13g of water that didn’t need to be there, but was due to greenwashed packaging.
Since I already had this experience with eSun PETG material that usually isn’t unusable out-of-the-box yet clearly improved after drying it properly, it’s safe to say that I’ll be avoiding eSun (and all other manufacturers) for as long as they ship on cardboard. And if I absolutely have to buy their stuff, like with that 83A, I
a) will be re-reeling everything right away
and
b) will be pre-drying it for at least two weeks before use.
Just get your shit together and use skinny plastic spools like everybody else – or add enough desiccant, you fools…
