I had the chance to test some interesting filaments from Fiberlogy.

Fiberlogy is one of the countless 3D printing companies originating in Poland, and they’ve been making high-quality 3D printer filament for several years now. We tested some Fiberlogy materials in 2017 and were impressed. Now, we try a few more. 

Fiberlogy representatives asked if we were interested in testing their material, and of course I responded, “Yes!” However, the next thing I knew a very large box with many different filaments arrived. It’s going to take a while to get through all of it, but for now I will start with this look at two of the filaments under test. 

In this report we’ll look at two filaments from Fiberlogy: 

• FIBERSILK METALLIC (Pink)

• IMPACT PLA (Orange)

Fiberlogy Filament Packaging

One important but often overlooked aspect of 3D printer filament is the packaging. Packaging varies considerably by vendor, and Fiberlogy’s has some good and bad points.

The filaments are shipped in standard cardboard boxes with a window so you can see the color of the filament inside. The spool itself is vacuum-packed with a desiccant sachet. For the type of material, you’l have to refer to the handy label on the back:

The label includes most of the important information for printing the material, but curiously does not include the recommended bed temperature. It does have a statistic for the “real average roundness” of this each spool. This one is “0.014 mm”, which is quite good.

The spool itself is a different style from what you normally see. Instead of a skeletal structure, FIberlogy has gone with a sculpted solid style that is quite attractive. However, it likely uses a lot more material than alternative spools and thus may become questionable when recycling interest rises.

While the detailed information on the filament is stored on the box, there is only a stamp on the spool to tell what type of filament is present. You’ll therefore have to keep the box (or at least the label) for the details.

I would like to have them relocate the holes for fixing the end of the filament. They are a bit to close to the center for proper use on a near-full spool, and they are in only one position on the spool circumference. It would be better to have another pair of holes on the opposite side to account for varying lengths of filament.

Fiberlogy Metallic Silk Filament

I’ve been curious about “silk” filaments for a while and now I had the chance to give it a try with Fiberlogy’s entry.

This material is essentially PLA, and can be treated in all operational respects the same. You slice and 3D print it in exactly the same way you 3D print normal PLA material. 

However, I found the optimum temperature for this material to be a bit different. I noticed that the shine seemed to be a little different depending on the temperature, and I ended up doing a temperature test with a number of cubes printed at different levels. 

I found the optimum temperature for both printing and shine to be a rather high 230C. That’s a bit higher than normal for PLA, but this material works very well at that temperature. 

What’s different? You’ll see when your print completes: the FIBERSILK METALLIC prints have an incredibly shiny surface, far more than any PLA you have ever seen previously. This filament’s results rival and may even exceed the shiny PETG prints you may have seen.  

This is particularly noticeable on designs that have slowly curving or faceted surfaces. This vase design is particularly good for this type of filament:

I’d like to print many more things in this material.

Fiberlogy IMPACT PLA

Fiberlogy describes IMPACT PLA as: 

“Create high-quality prints that exceed the durability of ABS and keep the precision, convenience and safety typical of PLA. Our IMPACT PLA filament will give your prints up to 50% higher impact strength than traditional ABS.”

I therefore quickly printed out several ASTM test coupons to see if I could gauge the difference in impact strength. However, after completing the prints I realized that I really don’t have the proper measurement equipment to perform a scientific test, so the coupons were not particularly useful. However, I did notice that the IMPACT PLA coupons were somewhat more flexy than the standard stiff PLA coupons. 

Instead I attempted to build a mechanical device with snap-tight connections to see how well IMPACT PLA would hold up. I chose to build a vise, the “Yet ANOTHER Machine Vise” designed by Christoph Laimer. This design is available on Thingiverse.

I found IMPACT PLA to be quite easy to 3D print and had no issues with temperature or adhesion. The vise parts took a while to complete, but once done I was able to successfully assemble the vise with no difficulty.

The important thing is that none of the parts cracked during the assembly, where they undergo a bit of stress as they must snap-fit together. 

I would definitely use IMPACT PLA for this type of project in the future. 

I’ve recently completed testing two more filaments from Fiberlogy, and my report is located here.

Via Fiberlogy