Wood Grain 3d Printer Filament

The folks at aleph objects makers of lulzbot printers were kind enough to provide me with a spool of colorfabb woodfill to be clear a wood filament is not a filament made out of wood.

Wood grain 3d printer filament.

Wood 3d printing was born around 2012. This is great for emulating realistic wood grain in your models. The presence of these particles gives the 3d printed parts the aesthetics of real wood. Thingiverse is a universe of things.

Wood based filaments are typically a composite that combines a pla base material with wood dust cork and other powdered wood derivatives. However since the whole point of wood filled filament is to have the texture color and look of wood the filler putty might take away from that because it won t be. The first filaments were pla based filaments with integrated sawdust. These are filaments that mix wood pieces together with a more conventional 3d print filament such as pla filament so the wood can be manipulated like more flexible filaments despite its inherent rigidity.

If you don t do this the filament s wood particles will burn creating a sticky black mess in the printer head. Download files and build them with your 3d printer laser cutter or cnc. Yet with wood filament you can even start with coloring during printing. So priming is not actually needed before painting.

Wood filament remains largely porous even after 3d printing. Moreover painting directly over the 3d printed model will ensure that the wood grain remains visible. The early experiments however showed that sawdust wasn t the best solution for either wood 3d printing nor wood filaments. Wood filament on the other hand will readily absorb stain as did the carpet after spilling a nearly full container.

We used an einstein bust as a test piece because it has a number of contours that we wanted to highlight. Ever tried 3d printing wood. Sanding a wood 3d print is very similar to sanding a normal piece of wood. As mentioned earlier changing the print temperature will produce subtle color changes.

When the 3d printing process is finished you can start the final touches. These days wood filament is still pla based but the wood is instead integrated in the form of wooden fibers. Typically the filament consists of around 30 wood particles but the exact number may vary depending on the brand. When you have a 3d wood print project and for some reason the printing is interrupted don t forget to remove the 3d print material from your printer head.