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Translucent vs. Transparent PETG Soap Dishes

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In addition to printing bendy objects with TPU, the 0.8 mm nozzle 3D-prints PETG into thin walls with better transparency than the default 0.4 mm nozzle:

Clear PETG - 0.4 vs 0.8 mm nozzle - side view
Clear PETG – 0.4 vs 0.8 mm nozzle – side view

The wall is now 1.0 mm thick, rather than 0.6 mm, and is much closer to being transparent. Those gray links from the RPi camera mount inside the dishes help show the difference.

The 2.0 mm thick base plate is also more transparent, but mostly just reveals the 0.4 mm thick infill layers:

Clear PETG - 0.4 vs 0.8 mm nozzle - top view
Clear PETG – 0.4 vs 0.8 mm nozzle – top view

More study is needed, even if we already have far more soap dishes than strictly necessary.

Comments

2 responses to “Translucent vs. Transparent PETG Soap Dishes”

  1. PPA Avatar
    PPA

    Interesting. Is the 0.4 nozzle printing two walls and the 0.8 printing a single wall?

    1. Ed Avatar
      Ed

      The walls are both a single thread wide:

      • The 0.4 mm nozzle squeezes out a 0.6 mm wall in one pass
      • The 0.8 mm nozzle does 1.0 mm similarly

      I think those are near the outer limit of what the nozzles can do, because the thread must be somewhat narrower than the nozzle tip and that’s on the order of twice the orifice diameter.