Black Forge Purple Filament
Preface:
I have to be honest up front, this filament took me through a lot of lessons to get to the point of the last few prints. To get to the point of writing this article, I had gone through 2 rolls of this filament. I got angry, I got mad, and I had quite a few creative cuss words thrown at this filament and printer. For those veteran 3D printer people out there may remember their first time going from standard filament to “glitter” filament. I searched and read and printed enough calibration cubes to build a doll house.
For those that are unaware, printing with standard PLA is one thing, but switching to a filament with glitter is a whole new monster. As you will see below, I attempted to print the Stronghero3D Black Forge Purple with a standard .4 nozzle, but I was replacing clogged nozzles after every print. No, not after a printing the roll, after every print. The first roll of Black Forge Purple I changed out 4 clogged nozzles. This is because the glitter inside the filament would get trapped inside the nozzle, and over time would build up to a clog.
How do you print with a glitter filament then? I would like to say “That’s Easy….” but lets be honest here, switching print nozzle size takes a lot of testing and setting adjustments. I switched to a .6 nozzle, and finished out the roll of Black Forge Purple, then continued testing and adjusting settings on a Gold filament. Eventually I had the gold happy, and was ready to go back to the Black Forge Purple (second spool) to see if the new printer profile settings worked… and they did!
Filament Roll #1:
As I mentioned before, I went through several .4 nozzles before I changed out to .6 nozzles on my Neptune 2S’s hot end. After each of these prints, or after 2 small prints, I was replacing nozzles (and Bowden tubes) due to clogs. I first tried to make printing profile changes in Cura to get past the clogging, but that wasn’t happening.
Even with clogs, the print quality and color was looking great. The purple to black transition is subtle enough that if you are doing small prints, you can get different colors from the same spool. Calibration cube looked great, the detail on the 3 Barrels was good, and I was pleased with the 3 Ring Holder I printed for some friends.
Next was time to move on to the Skull Bowl I am quite fond of. I have printed quite a few of these and different filaments, so I was quite anxious on trying this with the Black Forge Purple.
Change to .6 Nozzle:
This is the point where I switched to a .6 nozzle, and decided to “see what happens” by making changes I read online and by testing with a few calibration cubes. In all it was pretty close, but I later found out where the biggest headache was going to come from in my profile adjustments. For the Skull bowl, other than a few minor issues that were easily fixed with a heat gun, it looked great.
With this larger print you can really see the color transition in the Black Forge Purple shine. Not a lot of glitter in this filament and in many ways a good thing. Just gives the color a bit of pop. If anyone is curious as to the fate of the skull bowl, my daughter has claimed it and it now resides in the bowels of her room, probably never to be seen again….
After the Bowl-shaped mesh basket, I attempted my Cluthulu dice tower, but unfortunately I ran out of filament. I went ahead and ordered a second spool of Black Forge Purple. With all the calibration cubes, failures, successes, an incomplete dice tower, and the fact that I still had other things I wanted to see in this filament, I needed more.
During this time I decided to load some single color Duramic 3D Gold into the printer to do some fine tuning before the next spool of Stronghero3D arrived. This was a good thing as I made a ton of changes to my profile. Thank you to the suggestions on Tik Tok that helped me along.
Filament Roll #2:
After going through an entire roll of Duramic 3D Gold PLA, I had finally gotten my new printing profile dialed in pretty close. One of the major issues I was having, as you can see in the bowl, is when a print had a lot of retractions. Long prints were good, but once a bunch of retractions were happening, the prints were spotty. Strange gaps, horrible stringing, etc…
At the end of the spool of gold filament, I decided to start a skull bowl. My attempt was to get gold teeth, and finish with the Black Forge Purple. Here is what I got:
Not going to lie, I love this bowl. I was still getting a little bit of stringing, but overall a much better print than before, and nothing that a heat gun couldn’t help.
For those that are curious on how I did the color change, it was quite simple… runout sensor. Seated near the printer when it ran out of gold filament and started beeping. I immediately got up, pulled out the remaining gold filament, pushed in the fresh roll of Black Forge Purple, push a bit through the nozzle to clear the gold, and let the print continue.
I wanted to try a different bowl this time, and this bowl tested how well this (an my profile) handled bridging and some overhangs. Overall I was very impressed. The bridging isn’t prefect, but isn’t a failure either. I scaled this bowl up (I believe around 200%), and overall I am impressed.
These Dragon Eggs came out great, and I wound up printing several of these eggs until I finished off the roll of filament.
Conclusion:
I really like the Stronghero3D Black Forge Purple filament. Even though I struggled a bit in order to get prints in the beginning, in the end I was very happy with results. The glitter is minimal, and compliments the purple and black quite well, as you can see from the above images. Stringing was very minimal and easily cleaned up with a heat gun.
I will have to say I was pretty lucky in being able to grab two spools of this filament. At the time of writing this, Black Forge Purple was no longer available on Amazon. It is still listed on Stronghero3D’s website, so hopefully it will back in stock soon. I am looking forward to printing with this filament again.
STL’s of items printed above:
XYZ 20mm Calibration Cube (Thingiverse)
Warhammer 30k / 40K – Terrain – Barrels (Thingiverse)
Ring holder for single or three rings (Thingiverse)
Bowl-shaped mesh basket (Thingiverse)
Basket Bowl (Thingiverse)
Dragon Egg with Threads (Thingiverse)
Items Shown Above On Amazon
Disclaimer:
Links to Amazon are Associate links. If you wish to purchase any of the items listed above, I would greatly appreciate using the links provided above. You can also support my content by subscribing on Patreon. They help me to provide more content and reviews. As always, happy printing and thank you! – AudioCraZ