Fishy Filaments works with the Cornish Fish Producers’ Organisation (CFPO), and takes old and damaged nets that have mostly been used for catching hake. These nets are made of a type of nylon called PA6. They’re made to a high standard to withstand the rigours of working at sea.
These old nets are taken, processed, and turned into 3D printer filament. Porthcurno retains the aquamarine colour of the original nets.
Attempting to print
Nylon isn’t an easy polymer to print at the best of times, and most nylon filaments have an additive that makes them a little more cooperative. Usually this is carbon fibre, but other options are available. Porthcurno has none of this because it would detract from the colour and texture of the pure plastic.
Nylon does have to be printed quite hot – around 285 for the nozzle and 100 for the bed – this is within the reach of many printers these days.
The first problem is getting it to stick to a print bed. We were able to get some prints to stick to glue-covered PEI, but only if they had a large, even base. Any protrusions on the base were prone to peeling up, causing the whole lot to come off. Specialist nylon (also known as PA) print beds are available and may stop this.
The second problem is that nylon is extremely hygroscopic. This means that it sucks up moisture from the atmosphere. You can minimise this by keeping it in a sealed container with a desiccant (such as silica gel), but this won’t stop it. If there’s moisture in the filament, this will boil as the filament is heated, causing bubbles. These bubbles cause a couple of problems. They build up pressure in the print head, causing plastic to squirt out even when it shouldn’t, and they cause little voids in your prints.
Another concern is the particulate matter given off by this (and other nylons) as they print. It’s a bit hard to know how much there is as it’s invisible and odourless, but it’s recommended that you don’t print this without an enclosure or extraction system. This is something that we’d recommend you take seriously, especially if you plan on printing nylon more than occasionally.
That’s quite a long list of problems you can have with this filament. You could only justify such a tricky filament if there were significant benefits.
We’ll be honest, the only things we were able to print reliably on our setup (a Prusa MK4 with a filament dryer) were spiral vases. The lack of retractions meant that we didn’t get hit by the problems with blobbing that non-spiral prints gave us, and the roughly circular bases stuck well to glue stick-covered PEI. The only problem we had with these prints was occasional blobs of burned filament coming off the nozzle and damaging the print. It is recommended to use a non-stick nozzle for this, and we suspect that this would cure the problem. This also seems to be related to how wet the filament is, and when we got the filament completely dry, this didn’t happen much.
It is a bit of a problem that we were only able to reliably print spiral vases, but it does produce excellent spiral vases. The translucent blue-green shimmers in the light, and the semi-flexible nylon creates a durable model that feels good in your hands. To print more than this, you’d need a better filament drying setup (which probably means a dryer that can get hotter), and a print surface designed specifically for nylon (there is one for the Prusa printers, but it’s out of stock and we’ve been unable to test it with this filament). We can’t say how well it would print under these scenarios.
We love this filament. It looks great, it’s genuinely good for the planet, and it can make parts that are really durable. It’s a filament that tells a story – it’s not just recycled plastic; it’s recycled trawler nets, and its translucent green-blue colour looks like recycled trawler nets. This vivid image helps us understand our place in the circular economy and think about what it means to be responsible users of plastic.
We also hate this filament. It’s an absolute sod to print. You have to really want to print with Porthcurno for it to make the effort worthwhile. To be honest, we do really want to print with it. While it does look and feel great, there’s something a bit deeper to the story that made us keep persevering when we might otherwise have given up.
There is something prophetic about the difficulty in printing this filament. It’s almost like it was purpose-designed by an artist to remind us to be mindful of our plastic use because once it’s one thing, it’s not always easy to make it into something else. Maybe we’re just suckers for a material that tells a story.
Verdict
9/10
If you can get this to print, it looks great and makes durable objects.
