Someone pointed me to some transparent filament available, some months ago, made in Russia. It turned out to be “stirene-butadien-stirene copolimer”: SBS. It’s about the same material tires and shoes are made from.
The manufacturer is “Filamentarno“, Moscow based, and owned by a nice couple, Ruslan and Tatjana, both 3D printer enthusiasts.
It’s semi-flexible and is available in transparent and solid colors. The main advantage is that it can be dissolved by D-Limonene. That’s made of Orange apple skins.
For what I know the only other filament able to dissolve to smooth the surface of a 3D print is ABS, it will be dissolved by Aceton or Chloroform.
D-Limonene has the same effect on SBS: it makes it smooth and transparent.
Other filaments as PLA and HIPS can be chemical changed by caustic soda (PLA) and D-limonene (HIPS), but not dissolved AFIK.
After I had got some samples I got very enthusiastic, as this kind of filament is a great addition to already available kind of filaments. It took us 4 months to get the SBS filament exported from Russia, but eventually we succeed ;-). The shipping costs are enormous though.
I would like to make this great filament more known in the rest of the world and would like to get some feedback about it. I assume some main manufacturer/seller of filaments will have more possibilities to make it cheaper, but until that I’m proud to make it available “in the West”.
I printed one of Birks great shades with it:
The available colors and samples are here. If you like to try / buy this and live outside the EU, please mail me, so I can get you an accurate estimate of shipping costs.
Some other highlights of Filamentarno SBS:
- Food and Toygrade (in Russia)
- No warp: easy to print
- Constant filament diameter
- Semi flexible
- It gets Rubery on 80 degrees (Glass transition temperature)
- No smell during printing
- Beautiful Glass like colors
- Smoothing and transparency by D-Limonene
- Good layer bonding
Basically the print settings are like PLA: 215 degrees for the extruder, 60 for the bed (mainly to get the print stick to the bed, as I use Hairspray and a Glass bed.). 1.75mm filament diameter and 0.6mm suck and prime. For normal 0.4mm prints: the PW to 0.4mm and 0.2mm LH. The draw speed can be set to 60 or 80mm/s
It can be printed by the original hotend of the CraftBot, although it’s slightly flexible.
I have also printed with Slic3R: vase mode. I used a 0.8mm Nozzle and 0.2mm Layer height. The print speed at 15mm/s The flow tweak to 110% and the Path width at 1.3mm, to get a nice thick single wall. Most of the bottles I printed turned out to be water tight 
I sprayed D-Limonene on the print until a it was covered with a thin film of it. I started drying it after a minute with an hair dryer on max power. That’s necessary, as when you don’t do that the D-limonene will keep dissolving. Certainly with thin walls your object will change in pudding.
Some pictures by Filamentarno self:
Some pictures by me:
Bart, www.CraftBot.nl
