If you enjoy experimenting with new polymers and colours in your 3D Printing adventures, but aren’t eager to learn a whole new set of printing specifications for different types of plastic, eSUN’s eSilk PLA Filament is an exciting addition to our filaments that may certainly pique your interest. Designed with the easy-printing base polymer of PLA, and enhanced with polyester-like additives eSUN’s eSilk filament offers very cool aesthetics features while still maintaining the great properties that make PLA so easy to print with.

In a similar way to the Gold and Copper Silky Filaments that we stock, the natural sheen of silver works really well with the smooth and almost soft aesthetics that this unique filament offers. However, because of the neutral silver colour, this filament can be used for a much wider range of different prints. In fact, after doing some fun tests with eSUN Silver eSilk, we’ve found that it is just as great for printing household decorative items as it is for printing Cosplay gear, fashion accessories and even desktop gadgets. And in addition to just looking great in almost any form, the shine can also cause unique illusory effects on prints, which has produced in some very strange but awesome results that we’ve only seen before in the eSUN AluFill and SteelFill Exotic Filaments. So if you’re looking for an exotic filament to print in, but don’t want to hassle with the typical struggles of MetalFill filaments, this eSUN eSilk Silver is an excellent choice.

WHAT ARE THE BEST FEATURES OF SILKY PLA FILAMENT?

When talking about Silky PLA, the best features are quite subjective, and will depend on what your favourite factors are. However, the first and obvious amazing feature of Silky PLA is that the prints produced with this filament immediately look a lot nicer than standard PLA prints before any post-processing is done. In addition to this, Silky PLA also offers some unique benefits that many people don’t yet know about, and these include the following three distinct advantages that we’d like to tell you about:

• Despite looking somewhat soft and fluffy at first glance, Silk PLA actually offers less shrinkage than standard PLA. This is in part because of the polyester contained within the polymer, but is primarily because of the low glass transition temperature, which allows the filament to set for a slightly longer time before hardening into a defined shape.
• Again, despite the soft aesthetics of Silk PLA, it actually offers better toughness than standard PLA, which is due to the polyester additives providing better layer adhesion, flow capabilities and reduced stringing – resulting in a better overall polymer structure that can be bent, flexes or stretched more than standard PLA before it succumbs to permanent deformation.
•  Finally, and this doesn’t quite pertain to structural aspects, Silk PLA Filament offers the distinct advantage of maintaining near-perfect colour after printing. And whilst standard PLA often changes colour slightly depending on a variety of factors, from print temperatures to print speeds and even uncontrollable factors during the polymerisation process, the natural glossiness of Silk PLA directly translates through to the printed object, offering almost the exact same colour integrity before and after printing.

Of course, as with any 3D Filaments or other materials from other industries, there are also negative factors for Silk PLA, although the only real noteworthy negative factor is that Silk PLA has a lower temperature resistance than standard PLA. This means that Silk PLA is likely to start sagging and eventually melting when left in hot or sunny environments, although this factor is somewhat negligible since even standard PLA will do the same, but may just a slightly longer time to do so.