Thursday, April 2, 2015

Brick. Or stone. Or chalk. Or something.

OK, one more exotic material. Laybrick isn't, despite the name, brick-based. Rather, it's a composite of plastic and chalk dust, and is marketed as providing a sort of stone-like appearance. And it kind of does. The surface doesn't have the gloss of plastic or the metallic sheen of the copper and bronze filaments I've played with. Rather, it's got a faintly porous, matte surface like unpolished white limestone or perhaps a ceramic. However, what I thought it most resembled was bone. So:


It prints very smoothly, certainly. It's very difficult to see any kind of grain in this, even close up. There were some issues with the top layer and the protruding spikes, but I suspect that's up to my printer settings, since that sometimes happens with other filaments I use as well.

One of the advertised properties of this material is that it provides different textures depending on the temperature at which it prints. Cooler is smoother, hotter is rougher. I attempted printing an object with the same temperature-varying plug-in I used to print the wood pieces. The results weren't as impressive. There were striations, but they weren't particularly visible. I may try again with a greater temperature range.