Can Standard PLA Filaments Be Used on High-Speed 3D Printers?

My Creality K1 3D printer has a great dedicated PLA called Creality Hyper PLA.

However, if Hyper PLA cannot be used, I wondered if other materials could be printed, or like the actual problem I experienced, if I suddenly wanted to print with a different type of material, or if I had to buy filament because the filament was suddenly depleted, and whether printing was possible with other filaments instead of the dedicated high-speed PLA.

Of course, from the beginning of using the K1, I confirmed that printing with eSUN PLA+ was quite excellent.

For eSUN, they provided their own test results and output profile settings for the K1, but for other PLAs, you would need to perform calibration and adjust the filament settings yourself to obtain good print results.

And in my case, I recently wanted to try Silk PLA quickly, but since products with many domestic use cases take about 2 or 3 days from purchase to use, I looked for Silk PLA with Rocket delivery on Coupang to use it quickly..

It seems that among the products eligible for Rocket Delivery on Coupang, there weren't many Silk PLA options with good ratings.. So, I bought one that looked decent.

https://link.coupang.com/a/6gLlD

https://link.coupang.com/a/6wuCM

At a price of around 13,000 won.. considering that this is PLA which even arrives in a single day.. I was a bit worried whether this would print well.

Overall, it was a somewhat soft PLA material, with a feeling of being slightly thin.

So, I tried printing after adjusting the basic quality using the calibration process provided by the Creality slicer.

First, the temperature test showed that at temperatures higher than 190°C, a lot of spiderwebs appeared and the overall print quality was poor. It appears that printing should be done at a temperature lower than 190°C.

Flow was expected to be higher than 100% based on the above temperature results, but the calibration results showed that it should be set to around 98%~99%.

The PA (pressure advance) section showed little difference, so I set it to 0.05, which is slightly larger than the default value of 0.04, and ran the print.

Regarding maximum volumetric speed, it appears to be usable at around 10 mm/s ~ 15mm/s; however, when exceeding 15mm/s, some extrusion defects were observed. Therefore, to use the material with good quality, it seems best to set it to around 10mm/s. Compared to high-speed dedicated filaments, high-speed printing certainly seemed quite difficult.

Based on these settings, I printed the Benchy Ship, and as shown in the photo below, it printed quite well, giving a distinct metallic feel.

我也打印了设计师Jomy的奖杯模型数据，使用上面校准的数值进行打印，结果相当令人满意。确实，使用有光泽的 Silk PLA 可以获得具有金属质感的打印件。

For glossy PLA, the surface texture, such as the ghost effect often referred to as vibration quality defects, is more pronounced compared to matte PLA. Although this is clearly a quality issue, it seems to have the effect of making the surface gloss more visible.

Therefore, as shown in the data below, for prints with a surface made of geometric structures, the results appear to look better.

Finally, while I have been creating my own smooth figure data recently, I tried printing it using the K1. While the surface was a bit disappointing due to not properly setting the seams, and I was disappointed that the support generation didn't work well, overall it seemed to print quite well.

The overall content of this test can be verified through the video below.

Through this test, it was confirmed that standard PLA filaments available on the market can be used for high-speed printing on the K1.

However, regarding the maximum volumetric speed, which absolutely affects print time, raising it above 15 mm/s resulted in issues such as extrusion defects on the surface, so true high-speed printing appears to be impossible.

I plan to test whether other filaments purchased in the future also work well on the K1 printer.

Can Standard PLA Filaments Be Used on High-Speed 3D Printers?

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