Finally some printing...

Had problems with my Polypropylene (PP) welding rod that I bought for such a good price, so I started thinking about using ABS and that brought up thoughts of creating my own filament extruder (google Lyman Extruder). But then that started me thinking about printing with nylon, which I had some of. There were cautions of printing with Nylon because of bad fumes that could be given off. To balance that I found that there are some nylons currently made that don't have any smell or toxic fumes given off. Well I had some 2.2mm weed wacker that I had bought a long time ago prior to getting my PP deal. So I thought, why not try some. I heated up the extruder and pulled out the old white PP filament when it got hot enough and then threaded the new filament in. I heated it up to 230 C and used manual extrusion to get the white stuff out and see some of the new orange nylon start to exit the nozzle.

So on the left is the first print I tried today of a little test box I downloaded from thingiverse and then sliced with slicer.

I think that the temperature was too low (defaulted back to about 215 during my learning how to set up the configurations for Repetier. I use Repetier host and Repetier firmware and am happy with them so far.

The middle picture was after I figured that something must be causing the drift to the right for every layer, my assumption is that the default speed of 130mm/s for non printing move caused a bit of backlash from the sudden stop, so I set that down to the same 60mm/s that it was using for normal printing and infill settings.
Unfortunately the print temperature was a bit too low and it just stopped extruding.

Finally after setting the new temperature back up to 230C and trying again, I got the example on the right.
It made me very happy to see that I was finally getting results for all of my efforts. It actually looks like a box.

I may need to do more with rafting to keep the corner from curling. I think you can see a little rounding on the lower left edge.

Further thoughts on the PP, I think I may need to take the temperature up quite a bit higher for it to make it as fluid as I have done with the Nylon at 230C. If I can't get that to work I can always go with getting ABS and making my own filament extruder, I am kind of excited with doing that as a project anyways.