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I was over at Baldovin's maker space helping him calibrate his MAX and we noticed that the diameter of the filament had a big range. What are the current thoughts on acceptable deviation? We were getting numbers like 1.61mm to 1.68mm in the same foot of filament. Is that reasonable, or will it effect the print?

ramai wrote:I was over at Baldovin's maker space helping him calibrate his MAX and we noticed that the diameter of the filament had a big range. What are the current thoughts on acceptable deviation? We were getting numbers like 1.61mm to 1.68mm in the same foot of filament. Is that reasonable, or will it effect the print?

A lot of cheap Chinese sourced filament has horrible tolerances, and some of it is resold as not cheap filament.

Most of the filament is specced to either +/- 0.05mm or +/- 0.1mm. A while ago some friends and I had some samples extruded by a couple of US based companies to see if we could get a source of high quality plastic to sell, but even then all the samples we received were JUST inside the specified tolerances, and tighter tolerances added a ton to the price.

IMO it does make a difference in print quality, it's one of the reasons I only use Ultimachine filament, my experience is it's stunningly consistent despite the advertised spec, more so than the other suppliers I've tried.

Same here, I mostly stick with quality filament. You could still print if its less than 1.75mm as long as you specify the right sizes and are willing to accept a poor print.

Always worth spending the extra 5 bucks to save you hours of struggles!

There was a guy on this forum the other day from Quantum3d, a US supplier. I found this interesting chart on their website. If their tolerances are that good, I might just have to try it. Looks to be $30 a roll. Has anyone used their stuff?
The other top performers are from the UK and New Zealand.

I got a test sample from quantum 3d. Testing my calipers on it showed very little variation, which is good. Unfortunately I couldn't get a good print out of it. Maybe it has special temperature requirements or something but it didn't print the stuff I usually print very well at all.