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A Big Hello from a Soon to be UK Filament Manufacture :-)

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    A Big Hello from a Soon to be UK Filament Manufacture :-)

    First off you have a great Forum with plenty advice and a friendly atmosphere.

    First off I hope this is okay to introduce myself, not a sales pitch as that is not what this is about, More a hello we are coming soon type of deal.

    This is a first for me as this is the first place for us to announce that we are going to be one of the few Filament Manufactures in the UK and more than likely the newest Our Company is Called 3DQF (3D Quality Filaments) and we are going to be producing filament here in the UK Direct to you guys. Our aim is to provide High quality filaments at a realistic price bracket, Direct to the end user.

    I little History

    My father has worked in the plastic industry all his life, mainly reclamation but also with the prime producers. He has an invaluable understanding of plastics and how and what we can do to change and modify the properties to give you all a better end result. I have spent the past 13 year working in the radio control retail sector and have seen massive changes in how we now interact with our customer base, also the demand that is put on retailers. We are looking to try something a little different, Manufactures direct to the end user, this will reduce the cost significantly and put us inline with the cheaper Chinese filament that is flooding our shore. We are determined to have a "Made in the UK" stamp on a high quality product that can more than compete with product from outside the EU and at a similar price.

    This whole idea all started around a year ago now where I was talking with my father about 3D printers and the material that they uses, from this conversation everything snowballed and we are where we are today :-). Currently we have procured our industrial unit (Northwest of England Leigh Manchester) in the middle of December and have been moving in our machinery. We have the electricians turning up in the next week or so, and more machinery in the order books which is 4-5 weeks out. It's a very nervous time and exciting all at the same time so any words of encouragement are greatly received :-).

    Needless to say as with everything that new we will need to test our products and we will be more than happy if some off you would be happy to try our (FREE OF CHARGE) filament for your feedback.

    Once again thank you for taking the time to read this :-) I hope it was not too long and if anyone has an new ideas or can see anything that need more development please feel free to make a suggestion.

    Many thanks ROB @ 3DQF
    Last edited by Rob@3DQF; 01-10-2016, 09:14 PM.

    #2
    Yet another brit on the forum! It's great to see us brits are getting to grips with 3d technology.
    I would be happy to try your filament.

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      #3
      Hi Rob. Welcome to the forum! I'm in the US, but am always willing to test filament. Looks like you have good plastics background, so that should translate to good filament. Look forward to seeing what you produce!

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        #4
        Thank you Guys, Its very exciting times just hope everything goes to plan :-) and thank you for the word of encouragement :-) . Again we have some exciting idea just need to get over the massive cost of investment first the bill just keep coming LOL.

        ROB @ 3DQ

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          #5
          Hi Rob,

          Welcome to the forum. I hope the filament production goes well. Any photos would be great! they are always interesting

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            #6
            Yes we will be more than happy to show off our factory once set up :-) it great to see a project come together :-). As a side note we place our order for some power cable this afternoon, Should turn up Monday if everything goes to plan one extra thing that can be ticked off lol and one more bill to add to the pile lol

            Rob @ 3DQF

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              #7
              Just a quick update , we are still going lol and getting closer every day , we now have all our equipment and the Sparkies are due for the last time on Monday. After this we will be starting full size trials with all the new equipment running at once. Very exciting time and even more so for UK customers as we are going to be requiring testers of our filament :-) needless to say it will be free we just need feedback. If any of you are interested drop me a PM and a post in here to prompt me . I may not get back to you instantly but we will add you to our list of free beta trial filament.

              ​​​​​​we will need to know your Printer , filament size required (the plan is for both 1.75 & 3mm). We would also ask for the first run that we get users that have a good level of printer setup so that we don't run around chasing our own tails :-) .

              We will be doing plenty of free samples so don't worry if you miss out on the first round / none UK address or don't fancy the challenge of beta filaments lol.

              Anyway we have taken up enough of your time so thank you for reading :-).

              We are bursting with ideas :-) and can't wait to get started.

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                #8
                Hi Rob,
                Well done on getting the project working.

                I'm about 2 weeks away from launching my own equipment - also from the UK... exciting times for us both...

                Currently I have
                4 FlashForge-Dreamers going flat out 10 hrs a day
                + 2x New Nova Robotics-"Mimic" machines ... these have a 600 x 300 x 300 bed running at 300mm/s nominally & can also mimic the primary print with a slave print head coupled to the Primary unit giving real time duplicates of the primary print.

                Currently devouring at least 10 rolls of 1kg ABS filament a week, and likely to use a lot more soon.
                The machines I will be selling will need a couple of rolls of filament each too...

                If you have samples of these colours, I will be happy to trial & mail you the prints from them.

                Main materials I use are : In order of quantity bought in....
                ABS 1.75mm
                Black
                Yellow - Bright
                Gold - Metalic
                Bronze - Metalic
                Green - Bright
                Red - Bright

                Regards
                Grant B
                Last edited by GrantB; 08-13-2016, 09:59 PM.

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                  #9
                  Cool Grant and yes very exciting times, sounds interesting about your project as well we are interested in working with printer manufacturers so we will keep in touch :-).

                  Many thanks Rob@3DQF

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                    #10
                    Do you have a website setup yet?
                    On EBay I can see your material, but an ICANN WHOIS lookup gives 3DQF.com as a chinese company.
                    Best get a wiggle on if you want to register a domain.

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                      #11
                      Yea we could not get the .com unfortunately, or missed out on it one of the two. Give it a few years and they will give up on the crazy charges or go bump :-) and we will try again (Just done the same thing today as effectively our domain for a different company stolen from us and the ransomed back although two years later they have gone out of business and we bough the domain back for the standard fee). We have 3dqualityfilaments (on a .com & .co.uk) not as catchy though I must admit and also 3DQF.co.uk .

                      Website will be coming soon but currently we are so busy getting all the machinery up and running we have not had time.

                      The eBay listing have seen is ours, we had a few ton of filament as a trial batch direct from our manufacture in China. In all honesty this has been good filament and I print with it myself with good results but the issue with Chinese filament is consistent supply and unless you are lucky a good quality product to boot. Not to mention the risk involved in purchasing from abroad vs UK based company.

                      Last edited by Rob@3DQF; 08-09-2016, 08:08 PM. Reason: Phone battery went flat :-(.

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                        #12
                        Hi Again Rob,
                        PM me if you want a thorough evaluation of the material.
                        I can mail you the prints with all the various settings & bed clearance measurements & set-ups down to 20 microns & various materials to suit the clearance for bed set-ups etc.

                        I've got 6 machines available to do sample prints of identical parts at different settings if you are interested.
                        AND
                        I'm not after tonnes of free material... I've got plenty already, just hoping to find a reliable source of good quality material to buy in.
                        Regards
                        Grant B

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                          #13
                          Quick update

                          Well we started our purge this afternoon and pushed out around 30kg of purge material to clean out our extruder, next up is a production run on pellet around a ton of HDPE , this will start to test our down stream equipment. Thus far everything is running well although the real test is tomorrow as we are going for a full production run ( into pellets) .

                          Grant will do , we are still some time off but development work that you can do will be invaluable to us, an for the hobby as a whole. We will keep intouch :-) .

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                            #14

                            Well after what seems an incredibly long road we finally have a product that we are happy with. We have been testing 24 - 7 in-house although we would like some testers who are willing to try the filament and are UK based (purely down to the logistical cost of shipping worldwide at this early stage). I know Grant B is interested so a PM will be coming your way soon. We currently are using a very high-quality blend of PLA which is giving brilliant clarity and amazing finishes.

                            We are currently running a production of clear PLA at the moment as this allows us to see any inclusion or degradation in the material as it's produced. Colouring would hinder this process and thus we have currently decided that we are better running clear on the samples. As a side note, we did originally run a batch of black prior to starting the samples so there maybe some small traces of black pigment present in the samples.

                            So what are we after from you?

                            All we require is testers, you do not have to be a seasoned 3d printing expert nor do you have to be a novice, all we ask is try our filament with open eyes for free and send us an email with your findings. It's worth noting that they may be a hiccup along the way but that is what testing is for and thus go into this knowing that.

                            We are currently producing 1.75mm although we will also be doing a batch of 2.85mm. As stated above we are currently only doing PLA although we have some exciting materials to come in the future, we first need to get the bread and butter sorted and then we can move on to our exciting materials. In term of using our filament its really very easy, base settings of 170 - 220 deg stock retraction settings and away you go. We have even thrown this in printers set up for ABS with no issues. Currently, we have only used heated bed printers although we don't predict a problem on a none heated bed. It would be worth using some Elmer's Purple Gluestick or any of the other preferred adhesion methods to make sure the print stays
                            in place.


                            Well that wraps it up, please feel free to pop a message here and then drop me a PM if you interested :-),

                            Regards ROB @ 3DQF




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                              #15
                              Seeing as the forum was broken I guess most have missed this :-) . Just a friendly bump :-)

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                                #16
                                Okay after some more production revisions we have improved our tolerance and are producing an excellent filament made from a new PLA formula. As per the last post if you would like to test some filament please drop me a PM and we will get a sample shipped out to you Free of charge :-) . All we ask is for some simple feedback :-) . Currently this offer is for the UK and Europe :-) .

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                                  #17
                                  Cheers Rob

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                                    #18
                                    This is still running Guys :-), Seem to be having a few issues with the PMs so if you don't get a reply it could be the reason :-).

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