Fillamentum 92A TPU Filament – 1.75mm Traffic Black 0.5kg

For Makers looking to print a squishy little octopus friend or an interesting flexible mechanical part, a more unique style of 3D Filament is required. You may have enjoyed the easy aesthetics of PLA or the functional strength of ABS until now, but now the new Fillamentum TPU Filament has arrived. TPU is a thermoplastic polyurethane, which means that it fits right between rubber and plastic, and this results in a filament that can flex, bend, squish and more, depending on the style of the print and the infill used. This Fillamentum Traffic Black TPU Filament is praised as a high-quality polymer and a fun Exotic Filament if you are looking for something different to try on your 3D Printer.

Adding flexibility to your 3D prints has far more advantages other than creating a fun toy to occasionally flatten in your hand. Fillamentum is a brand that always excites us with their engineering-grade 3D Filaments while maintaining a standard easy for Hobbyists to print and enjoy! This particular TPU is classified as 92A, which directly references its softer elasticity while maintaining good tensile strength. Fillamentum 92A TPU Filament is designed with useful functional properties such as wear resistance. Being softer and flexier than the 98A TPU line, this 92A TPU is slightly trickier to print with but ideal for stylish cellphone covers that easily slip around your phone, for rubbery sealants to make a container watertight, as well as many other useful applications.

This Fillamentum TPU Filament is Traffic Black, with a smart smooth finish. Fillamentum is one of the most reliably vibrant brands with colours that are defined to precise RAL and Pantone standards, as well as checked by extreme quality control measures. Although TPU may be tougher to print than other standard filaments, the results are worth the effort as you print your favourite TPU designs, such as the classic “Flexy Rex.” As we’ve mentioned, TPU can also be quite an impressive functional filament that can easily be utilized in the real world. We’ve enjoyed TPU’s handy applications like high-grip robot wheels, rubber feet for 3D Printers, door stops and many other useful things that we can use around the office and home. Fillamentum Traffic Black TPU is an awesome material to have on hand, with high levels of functionality and incredible flexing fun!

Helpful Tips for Printing with Fillamentum TPU Filament:

3D Printing with the highly flexible TPU polymer is a fun, yet potentially difficult task, but is not quite as difficult as many of the popular sources would have you believe. It may certainly take a little bit of trial and error to get just right (and some patience too), but the results are incomparable, and no other filaments can achieve the same unique properties that TPU and TPE can.

However, if you really want to get the most out of your TPU prints, and enjoy durable and stretchy filaments that really add a whole lot of character and fun to any design, we always recommend finding as much information as possible, which is why we’ve got this awesome collection of external research for you:

• TPU Printing Tips – The Infamous Direct Drive Myth: If you’ve ever done research on or have investigation the exciting but often-tricky TPU filament, you will have certainly seen at least one resources suggesting that TPU printing is impossible with a Bowden setup. However, while this used to be true in the past, this is no longer the case with the more recent models and iterations, and modern Bowden-style desktop 3D Printers now offer a far more constrained filament feed-path, making them more than just capable of printing with flexibles, with some 3D Makers even suggesting that it’s a better setup compared to the older direct drive setups. So if you’re a proud owner of one of the many Creality 3D Printers since as far back as the Creality CR-10S model, you can rest assured that printing TPU is definitely a possibility that you can enjoy, opening up many new opportunities for printing unique, exciting and memorable 3D prints.
• TPU Printing Tips – Speed Kills (Good Prints): When dealing with a new filament (or even one that we already know) it’s always tempting to try to print it as quickly as possible, since time is money and the majority of us are cost-conscious 3D Makers. However, printing TPU too quickly is the easiest way to kill a good print, since TPU demands substantially lower speeds than standard polymers like PLA. This is primarily due to the high level of flexibility and the ability of the filament to compress and stretch, which can easily lead to clogs and other problems as the filament bends over itself and tangles within any open spaces it can feed. This is why it’s important to print slowly, allowing the filament to steadily move without too much speed-related friction, encouraging it to behave nicely and avoid bending or tangling between the filament drive gear and the nozzle.
• TPU Printing Tips – Retraction & Backpressure: In a very similar fashion to the previous tip, it’s important to also get right is retraction and backpressure, since flexible filaments tend to have a slight amount of delay when moving within a constrained filament feed-path. This delay is caused by the compression and expansion of the filament in conjunction with the high levels of friction against the walls of the feed-path, and is precisely why you want to minimise retraction distance and speed by as much as possible, wherever possible. With a high level of retraction, the push and pull action on the filament can happen too quickly, and if the TPU is still hot when this happens, it can easily get stuck along the walls of the cooling tower or Bowden tube, leaving inconsistent chunks that can result in clogging or oozing. Of course, retraction is a lot more complicated than many other settings on a 3D Printer, so be sure to prepare yourself for a bit of trial and error when you get started printed with TPU, and consider even leaving retraction off until you have all of your other settings dialled in just right – then move on to experiment with how retraction can improve your results.
• TPU Printing Tips – Keeping Your TPU in Tip Top Shape: With most of the common filaments like PLA, ABS and PETG, keeping them stored safely and out of reach of humidity and moisture is not too vital, as most of those filaments are relatively neutral in terms of how easily they absorb moisture from surrounding environments. With some filaments, however, such as TPU and Nylon, it’s imperative that you always try to keep them as isolated from humidity as possible. Of course, you don’t necessarily need to invest in expensive (and often unnecessary) specialised filament drying containers, but it is a good idea for get yourself a nice container to keep filament in, and then simply throw any spare sachets of desiccant (Those small silica gel packets you get with new shoes) into the box to remove excess moisture from the small space. This will help keep your TPU filament safe from moisture, which will prevent any bubbling or weaknesses in the filament as it’s being printed.

As a final note, it must be said that TPU, TPE and other Flexible Filaments are some of the more difficult polymers to print with, so it’s important to go into this with an open mind and a willingness to learn from mistakes. However, with that being said, modern machines like the Creality Ender 3 Pro and Creality CR-10S Pro V2 have made printing with TPU so much easier than ever before, and with a bit of trial and error (and patience) you can easily learn to create your very own flexible keyrings, desktop toys, cable holders and even shoes!

Additional Resources for 3D Printing TPU:

If you’re still eager to learn more about the intricacies of 3D Printing with TPU, and want to sink your teeth into more knowledge to arm yourself with information to help you succeed with this tricky filament, we’ve got you covered, and we’ve taken the time to collect together some of our favourite resources, guides, tutorials and discussions on this matter. Each of these offer some unique insights that can help you not only achieve success with this awesome 3D Filament, but actually help you troubleshoot problems, figure out what exactly is going wrong, and then prevent those problems from happening in future prints. Just remember, however, that each of the following resources will have their own unique take on printing TPU, and may have used different brands or colours in their tests, although they can still offer great assistance if you’re running into troubles, or are just looking for further information over and above what we’ve provided:

• This insightful Pinshape TPU Filament Best Results Guide is an excellent resource for anyone to being with, offering loads of great information on TPU, and discussing some of the main challenges that newcomers experience when trying out TPU for the first time.
• The second resource to make this list is the MatterHackers flexible Filament Guide, which covers both TPU and Soft PLA, and caters to a lot of factors ranging from print settings to filament storage – also having similar opinions about the classic TPU Filament Direct Drive myth.
• Third on the list is the ever-famous Simplify3D, offering their succinct but highly informative Simplify3D TPU Printing Guide, which caters to both newcomers and veterans, with a few sample projects along the bottom to help you troubleshoot with more clarity.
• Finally, this Prusa Printers Blog TPU Guide is a truly expansive and valuable collection of information about 3D Printing with TPU, offers details on what the polymer is made of, what TPU is most commonly used for in 3D Printing, as well as what kinds of problems and solutions you can expect when starting out with this tricky filament.

Starting in as early as 2013, but with roots that go even further than that, Fillamentum is a brand that actually began working in the automotive industry, before moving into the packaging industry, and then eventually arriving in (and specialising in) 3D printing, where they found their true passion. And as a company that has always placed a high priority on following innovation, they took to 3D printing like a fish to water, and since 2013, have been consistently introducing fresh new innovations to the industry in the form of new types of polymers, refinements to classic polymers, as well as hybrid polymers that blend in materials like wood for distinctively unique effects.

What we really love about Fillamentum and their awesome 3D filaments range, is that they offer true consistency even between hundreds or thousands of batches. In fact, they actually match many of their colours to specifically defined Pantones and RAL colours, which are universal colour standards that artists, designers and many other professionals commonly use for precision colour coordination. This of course is complemented by their consistent quality, with an impressive (and tested) 0.05mm tolerance throughout each spool, as well as consistent results from various colours across multiple batches during our own testing phases.

As a brand that clearly demonstrates its passion for 3D printing through it’s beautiful 3D filaments, we’ve been exceptionally impressed with Fillamentum, and we certainly won’t be too surprised if Fillamentum becomes your new favourite 3D filament for all occasions.