3D Printing Blog

BendLay is another alternative filament from Orbi-Tech, the developers of LayBrick and Laywoo-D3 3D printer filaments. By design the BendLay is supposed to be something in between ABS and PLA in terms of properties and is intended to be used where ABS is too hard and flexible PLA is not tight enough, even though the filament is essentially a modified ABS . The BendLay is available in the form of transparent glass-like form only and according to the manufacture is: clear like Polycarbonate, bendable and resilient, high-impact resistant and unbreakable, easier to print than ABS, has no stress whitening by bending, with high interlayer adhesion and is apparently food-safe. It is supposed to be printed between 215° to 240°C and should be printable at high speed offering thermal stability the same as PLA (65 – 70°C). The most significant advantage that the BendLay has is that it is highly bendable without breaking, but is not as flexible as a flexible PLA filament, so it will not break very easy when you bend it as ABS or PLA might, but at the same time it is also not too flexible to be rubber like.

So far it all sounds good, so we have ordered a sample of BendLay filament to try it out. We tested it on out MakerBot Replicator 2 printer, but unfortunately we did not have very good success in printing with BendLay. We did not see the specific requirement for a heated build platform for using with this filament, but apparently it is required to get good printers. We have tried different extrusion temperature from 210 to 250 with both slow and fast printing speeds, but the filament was just not sticking well enough to the build plate. We have properly leveled build plate with 3D blue painters tape on it and when printing with BendLay on it we are seeing that there is slight warping at the edges of smaller objects and trouble with the printed part sticking good enough. So after a few layers we usually get the object detached form the build plate and he print failing, regardless of what settings we have used. People with heated build platform may have more success, but if you don’t have one you might want to stay away from BendLay and save yourself some trouble trying to figure out why you are getting so many failed prints.