Learn how to dry 3D printer filament: signs it’s wet, safe temperatures for PLA, PETG, TPU and nylon, and the methods that work without ruining your spool.

We run our own print farm alongside importing and retailing filament, which means we see the cost side of this business from both directions — as the supplier and as the customer buying our own stock at cost. Most of what eats margin on a print farm isn’t the filament price itself. It’s everything around

We get asked, reasonably often, why we don’t carry a wider spread of budget filament brands — some customers assume more options means better prices, and sometimes it would. Here’s the honest reasoning, including the part where it costs us sales. Why Not Just Stock the Cheapest Filament Available? Because we run our own print

Drone and RC frames put a filament under a specific combination of stresses that most other prints never see: constant vibration, sudden impact from crashes, and a hard ceiling on how much weight you can add before flight performance suffers. That combination rules out some obvious-looking choices and makes a few less-obvious ones the right

Most filament sellers stock one brand and tell you it’s the best. We stock ERYONE, Creality and SA Filament PLA side by side, print with all three on our own farm, and genuinely don’t think any one of them is “the best” — they’re built for different priorities, and the honest answer depends on what

Most filament storage advice online is written for climates that don’t match ours. South Africa’s humidity varies hugely by region and season, but coastal areas and Highveld summers both push moisture into unsealed filament faster than a lot of imported advice accounts for. You don’t need a R5,000 dry box to deal with it —

Stringing — those thin hairs of plastic left between separate parts of a print — is usually the first real troubleshooting problem a new 3D printer owner runs into. The good news is it’s almost always fixable in an evening. The less good news is that a lot of the advice online treats it as

Polycarbonate is the strongest and most heat-resistant material in common use for FDM 3D printing — tougher than ABS, far tougher than PETG, and able to survive temperatures that would deform every other filament on this list. It’s also genuinely difficult to print well, which is why most people don’t need it, even when it

PETG sits in the gap between PLA and ABS — stronger and more heat-resistant than PLA, easier to print and less smelly than ABS. It’s the material most people reach for once PLA starts feeling too brittle for what they’re actually building. Get the settings right and it’s a genuinely easy filament to work with;

PLA (Polylactic Acid) is the filament almost every 3D printer ships with a sample of, and for good reason — it’s the easiest material to print well, the most forgiving of beginner mistakes, and the cheapest to experiment with. If you’re trying to decide what to load first, the short answer is: PLA, and here’s