I keep very little PLA on hand. I have some PLA wood filament and I snagged a roll of PLA-CF to fill out an order when BL were having their sale over the holidays. At the moment, my prints are either PETG-HF, ABS or ASA, with and without fiber.

While it prints quickly, produces decent looking parts for prototyping, and is allegedly compostable, in most cases (for me, anyway) the properties of PLA differ too much from the intended final materials to be of much use other than having a physical model in-hand (which can and does have its uses). To minimize waste and print times, I do a lot of thin template printing to work out potential dimensional issues before finalizing a design, and usually do so in the final material.

For my recent ABS-GF blower fan project, I think I printed 3-4 5mm thick profile templates to work out critical dimensions and figure out some tricky areas. Each template was under an hour print time, so revisions could be made faster. Between the templates and carefully checking the modeled parts before printing, she managed to go together first time out, even as a partial glue-up assembly. I started the templating process with a rear view mirror relocation bracket project for the LJ and have been doing it on everything since (as required). It's hard sometimes to resist the urge to print the whole thing early on, but I found the material savings alone is worth a little self-control.

ABS-GF Blower Fan & Profile Template Printing Process

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