It’s A New Filament Friday! New Flexibles and Metals

3D Printing & Imaging
It’s A New Filament Friday! New Flexibles and Metals
BrassScull
Ne Celtic Skull by Artec3D: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:29114

 

Today, we saw two announcements for new 3D printing materials coming to market. 2014 has seen a huge rush of new filaments coming forward, as well as users who are adopting their unique attributes to take their 3D printing projects to the next level.

GoldBar

First, Colorfabb has announced that BrassFill will join BronzeFill and CopperFill in their metal imbued filaments line. These filaments start out with a dull gritty surface finish when printed, but after being polished show what makes them really special. BrassFill reports to polish to a gold-like appearance that should be perfect for the costume jewelry designers out there.

Colorfabb isn’t the only manufacturer who is working on bringing metal-laced filaments to the market. Proto-Pasta recently announced their own line of metal filaments with Magnetic Iron and Steel as the first two offerings.

Stay tuned for upcoming articles as we explain how to work with these new metal filaments, and how to finish them to bring out their unique characteristics.

SemiFlexAlso officially announced today is Fenner Drives newest addition to the NinjaFlex line, SemiFlex. SemiFlex takes the stretchy/squeezy attributes of NinjaFlex that we all love and brings it down a notch. For some use cases, NinjaFlex was just too soft and malleable.  SemiFlex fixes this, while also providing a flexible filament that more easily reproduces fine details in your models. SemiFlex is on sale now, but is limited to four colors for its initial launch.

To learn more about working with flexible filaments, check out my “Fun With Flexibles” article in Make Volume 42. As soon as I get my hands on SemiFlex, I will run it through the same tests to see how it stacks up to the competition.

FlexAttributes
Ninjaflex/SemiFlex Comparison Chart

 

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Matt is a community organizer and founder of 3DPPVD, Ocean State Maker Mill, and HackPittsburgh. He is Make's digital fabrication and reviews editor.

View more articles by Matt Stultz

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