1.75mm on TAZ workhorse

I just received my TAZ Workhorse. I was shocked that it didn’t come with a spool of filament. I was stuck either with no printing filament for a few days (nobody sells 3mm filament within 2 hours I checked) or trying to get my 1.75mm that I have leftover from my previous 3D printer. It had a failure rate of about 1 clog every 2-3 hours. These clogs were difficult to remove and I ended up just giving up and waiting for my 3mm filament. I didn’t mess with the settings except to select the 1.75mm diameter in Cura so others may have better results. Considering the cost of the printer I would have expected at least half a spool of filament to be included with my Workhorse! Now I have to wait a few days for my 3mm to arrive and I even took time off work to coincide with the delivery of my workhorse so that I could play with it uninterrupted for a few days straight :frowning:

I used to find 3mm filament at Microcenter stores, but not sure what the recent stock is. eSUN ABS is usually available on Amazon. I also buy bulk from eSUN filament from intservo.com.

Black and White ABS is what I usually feed through my TAZ5.

As a young automobile owner during the years where the industry transitioned from Imperial to Metric (mostly) perhaps I became overly fixated on proper dimensions for everything – so when I got my first Lulzbot printer, it never even occurred to me to attempt the wrong size filament! :smiley: I’ve since learned (as you have noted in your post) that 1.75mm in a 3.0mm tool-head “kinda sorta” works, about as well as jamming a 1/4" nut onto a metric bolt.

As for including filament, well, perhaps they should. I found that filament is a highly personal thing, probably due generally to the type of things one prints, but a lot of it also just preferences, and not changing something that works. Despite all the “ABS is obsolete” articles I’ve read, Village Plastics’ ABS is the most common filament I’ll use for anything “real” where temperature or mechanical strength is required. I’ll use eSun PLA-plus for most everything else, including test prints and such. Lulzbot has seemed to switch to nGen, and I’ve seen folks touting that as a replacement for both PLA and ABS – so I bought some. It prints fine – and the nice glossy finish is a bonus. But it’s slow, the glue on the bed is messy, and it’s brittle with some adhesion issues (the last issue I could probably fix if I spent the same amount of time tuning the printer for nGen as I have to ABS). PET-T or PET-G (t-glase and the like) are very nice filaments too, but they print too slowly and are just too expensive to replace ABS and PLA-Plus for everything.

In the end, I’m glad Lulzbot didn’t stick me a roll of nGen - I’d have been far less happy than I was with the first roll of eSun PLA-Plus that I bought with the printer, and that first impression is lasting. Sorry that you feel cheated - in Lulzbot’s defense, the toolhead was never designed to handle 1.75mm filament.

They come with rolls of filament now.

These days they are coming with rolls of filaments.