Do you only print expensive brand name material or are you using cheap filament? What that means for your printer and how this piece of badly clocked my nozzle all in this video. Let's dive right in. Welcome back factory owners. When it comes to 3D printing material, you find a lot of different opinions out there. Some people even treat it as religiously as choosing the perfect motor oil for their car. I have a colleague who only uses Prusa Man for his Prusa Mark III for example. After all, you spend quite a bit of money on your printer so you shouldn't she bought on consumables, right? I've been printing a lot of different materials and brands over the past couple of years. A lot of high quality materials from Germany and Austria like Dasfilament, material for Print and Extruder, but also cheap filaments from Amazon Basics, Erie 1, Sunlu, Yayo and Gtech. Even a few white label filaments I got from random sources. So in today's video I'm talking about the experiences I had with suppliers from very at price ranges. Let's start with print consistency. As my loyal viewers know, my focus is practical tools and parts so I won't get much into the aesthetics of the printed models. But since I recently got a macro lens for my camera, you'll be able to enjoy some serious layer peeping. I probably won't remember every detail, but I do my best to show the filament type, manufacturer and printer used on screen. I'm usually too lazy to dial in temperatures since I primarily want to get stuff done. My models are mostly one of models and printing is a means to an end for me. Occasionally I adjust things like speed and temperature in the middle of the print if I feel it would benefit the end result. Even with that approach I never had any filament resulting in objectively bad prints. The closest I came to cursing a filament was when I printed the accent parts of my Warron 2.4 with a really nasty roll of cheap white label ASA height lying around. I specifically wanted it to be that washed out red color to give it an 80s retro look. It's the same material that repeatedly walked from the bed in my last video about printing ABS and ASA. Although printing it was fairly difficult and it gave off a lot more fumes than higher quality brands, the parts are holding up well physically. The layer consistency is somewhat questionable but still good enough for technical parts. Keep in mind this is the worst example I could think of just to show you that even the worst material is usually still somewhat usable. It might require quite a bit more skill and patience to print it successfully though. The vast majority of materials I used were pretty flawless. Some might have had more variations in diameter consistency than others but nothing to bite home about for me. I can't even say with certainty that my more expensive materials always had an edge over cheaper ones in that regard. So my conclusion is print consistency is usually pretty decent with filament from any price range these days. Especially if you're not layer peeping there's nothing to worry about. You can even get very nice colors and types like marble or silk PLA for cheap. So they all look decent but they surely must be a difference in materials to length, right? Right? First of all I have to say that I'm not Stefan and this is not CNC Although I can say good and tack everyone pretty well I don't print test samples or do scientific comparisons. My conclusions are based on regular everyday usage without pushing the parts to the absolute limits. In recent years they also seems to be a trend to carbon fiber everything. People just love carbon and I can't blame them. For most applications though this is totally overkill and depending on the use case you might be way better off with a different material. It's also abrasive so you need a hot and steel nozzle to print it. A regular brass nozzle with the great pretty quickly. My point being the theoretically strongest material isn't always the best choice. Stefan even learned that the hard way when you build his Voro on 0.2 from seemingly stronger carbon fiber nylon instead of ABS for example. The issue being that nylon deforms under pressure which led to loose parts and him rebuilding the whole machine from scratch. I also saw a test a few years ago where they printed shelf brackets out of many different materials. The goal was to hold as much weight as possible. I was pretty surprised when good old reliable PLA won the test. Although PLA is not extremely strong it's much different than most other polymers. When it failed it shattered two pieces while the other materials just flexed and dropped the weight. When this kept the brackets intact dropping the very thing they're supposed to be holding up isn't very helpful. Long story short in my experience cheap material holds up just as fine as the more expensive variants. Choosing the right material for the use case has a way bigger impact. Pushing a material close to its physical limits is never a good idea anyway. In case you want to make sure the part can withstand as much load as possible you can still combine it with metal hardware where possible. I explained that concept in more detail in my free design and print guide you can download with the link in the description below and thanks for applying some solid infiltrate the like button while you edit. Combining metal hardware with printed parts results in virtually indestructible parts. I do that quite often even my studio lights I held up with metal reinforced holders. But what about the winding? Surely cheaper filament has to be inferior? Or is it? In the last few years the quality of the spool winding has increased pretty drastically over the whole market. I owned a lot of spools with different manufacturing dates where cheap spools that are a few years old are objectively the worst and even the expensive brands had slight flaws in the winding the new ones are pretty much perfect. Since there's no possible upgrade to an already perfect winding there's no way in which expensive filament could gain an advantage here. I also never had any tangled filament on any spool whatsoever. From my understanding it's physically impossible to tangled a spool while winding it anyway. This can only happen if the loose end of the filament slips beneath a partially unmanned spool. So if that happens it's most likely you weren't careful while handling and let it partially unwinding. And now the thing you've all been waiting for the revelation who's at fault for the clogging of my nozzle IT set in the intro. And here comes the big surprise I was using brand name material from the German manufacturer at Asphillia meant when that happened. There certainly was no cheap material involved but I can't even guarantee that the metal flake originated from the filament. It looked like brass so it might as well have been a manufacturing residue from the nozzle. I was using a Bantech CHT nozzle at that time. With its three separate holes it's certainly more complex to manufacture. Not since I can't tell for sure I won't blame anyone here. Besides this was nothing a quick cold pull couldn't fix. That's when you start heating the nozzle from room temperature and pull the contained filament out as soon as it starts getting soft. It's an easy way to get most residue out of a clogged nozzle. With a regular nozzle you get one string of filament. With a CHT nozzle you get the three strands you saw in the picture. Looks pretty neat and still works just as fine as with any other nozzle. But wait I actually do have a complaint with some of the cheap filament I soon knew in Ya'ayu both don't print the material type contained anywhere in the box. The boxes look pretty similar and they're from the same town so I guess the companies are somewhat related. Since I love a nice bargain and like a bit of impulse control I got quite a few spools as you can see in the background. So to keep my sanity and not get confused that meant I had to write a material on every box myself. While this is annoying the at least print those info along with recommended temperatures on the spool itself. Unlike extruder who print the temperatures only on the box and not the spool. This has annoyed me quite a few times. Usually I throw the card in a way after taking out the spools so I even had to look them up on the website at times. It also doesn't have that some of their recommended temperatures like for PTG that were quite a bit from the usual recommendations. What I found really nice on the other hand is that Ya'ayu filament chips on cardboard spools. In my opinion using cardboard is a big plus for the environment. At least here in Germany paper actually gets recycled but plastic often just gets burned. From what I heard those cardboard spools don't work with the bamboo laps AMS but since I use a Prusa MAU I don't really care about that. So in my experience there's absolutely nothing to worry about using cheap filaments. They've gotten quite good in quality over the last few years. Some rare cases might be harder to print but usually they work just fine. There's also no elevated risk of damaging your printer in any way. Even if you do end up clogging your nozzle for some reason they usually can be fixed and if not they're easy and cheap to replace. Not only do I print a lot of cheap filament I'm also mostly using cheap nozzles. Despite that I never had any issues caused by that. I hope this video was helpful and if you want to see more you can subscribe over here and watch another one over there. See you in the next one.