Guide How To Print Glass (Optically clear prints with FFM!)

[Eric]

First off this is not about printing glass, it's about 3d printing with a filament printer and getting optically clear prints as though they are cast in acrylic or glass. Someone seems to have found the perfect settings to make insanely clear fused filament prints! I have not tried this yet so I cannot attest it's quality but I'm definitely buying a box of clear filament from my shop to experiment with soon! I think this one could be a amazing solution to use with the PolyMaker Polisher setup which can smooth the outside surface as well.

They are not using special filament, it's just clear PETG, anyone who has tried printing clear PETG quickly finds that it normally becomes fairly white and cloudy once actually printed, getting something clear beyond a single layer wall has not been common before.


Instructions for settings are on the details page, if you have simplify3d you can load up their gcode file, I do not recommend running outside gcode on your machine though, I would just use that to gather settings for simplify3d. If you use Cura or Prusaslicer you should just copy their settings on the details page.

How To Print Glass by Rygar1432 | Download free STL model | Printables.com

How to print GLASS! The first thing to understand is a very slow speed is necessary, so patience is a must. | Download free 3D printable STL models

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[DrNezbit]

That's amazing! My "transparent" PLA I got isn't transparent at all when printed more then a layer thick I wonder if there's a magic setting for pla too

 

[Eric]

I'm willing to bet a lot of the principals they used would transfer over well, what seems to be pretty key is that are printing very slowly and very thin layers with no cooling. PLA should actually be very tolerant of those conditions too!

 

[Eric]

It took almost a year before I got around to trying this method myself. I only have polycarbonate on hand at the moment so I am trying it out with that material.

Based on the guide it seems like the important take-aways are no fans, print at 10mm/s and do not have the infill alternate direction between layers. In prusaslicer I achieved this by setting the infill to "aligned rectilinear" which is just the rectilinear infill without direction changes. They also suggested setting the top and bottom layers to 0, presumably to preserve the filament path direction.

I printed a 20x20x4mm test peice



I tried polishing the outside to see what is the surface deviations and what is infill air-gaps: there is good half and a bad half for some reason:



:

 

[Eric]

I took what I learned from the small square and tried a larger test with my filament swatch cards, the clear one was printed at the slow 10mm/s and took 18 hours while the foggy white version was printed at the specs advertised on the box in a little
over an hour.