solarbird | I’ve learned something about Creality’s budget PLAs

I need to revise an opinion I’ve expressed about Creality’s basic PLA, mostly back on Reddit.

People used to ask for opinions about various filaments and a lot of us would say that while the sample PLA included with the Creality printers was always shit, if you actually bought a reel of their PLA, you’d find it perfectly reasonable. Not great, not by any means – but a reasonable, basic no-frills PLA for a good price.

But you’d also have a couple of people – fewer, but not zero – jumping in to say “no, Creality PLA is shit.”

And what I’ve learned over the last month or so is that there are secretly two kinds of Creality PLA, and they’re not well distinguished from each other. They’ll even be on the same Amazon product page. You kind of just have to know.

One is exactly as I described, and I stand by that opinion.

The other… it’s not good for much more than drafts, in my opinion. Not even for test objects – well, that’s unfair. Not for test objects that require any strength. The layer adhesion is much worse, the plate adhesion is worse (helped by higher plate temperatures, but you really have to crank it up), and the cooling contraction over larger areas is much worse.

Once you get used to it and figure out its annoyances, it’s not that bad if you don’t need strength. After all, it does print, it doesn’t clog and it’s otherwise adequately behaved – but it is a much weaker filament and has proven inadequate for even lightly stressed test objects.

So how do you tell them apart?

The more-expensive single-spool packs of PLA are fine.

The two-spool PLA bundles are not fine. It’s not a quantity discount; it’s a different filament.

I really honestly thought the cheaper price was bundling. I mean, the actual exchange rate means even low-cost PLAs are overpriced, so it made sense to me. But I was wrong. And the behaviour of this two-spool pack PLA really explains a lot about some of those old commenters back on Reddit.

Anyway, my opinions about plain Creality PLA stand – but only for the single-spool package.

The double-spool combo, though? Oof. Unless you do a lot of draft printing, in which case I could see a use case… I don’t think it’s worth the discount.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.