There's a Global Shortage of Toilet Paper

There's a Global Shortage of Toilet Paper

But more importantly there appears to be a global shortage of PLA. I've been printing a fair few things recently and thought it'd be a good idea to stock upon PLA filament. Unfortunately I found that lots of suppliers were out of stock and the price had risen to about double what I last paid. I managed to buy some PLA at a higher price than my last purchase, so I have some in stock.
I had a look around and found that PETG was an odour free plastic (not biodegradable though) that seemed to be similar to PLA. More importantly it was available. I bought some as a sample.

My fisher 3D printer doesn't have a heated bed. This hasn't caused me any problems with PLA other than a slight warp on some larger prints. The bed has Buildtak (BuildTak?) on it which is a very nice surface. PETG seems to need a heated bed according to the internet. Anyway, the PETG arrived and I had a go at printing with it using my normal PLA settings and no heated bed (I've ordered some parts but they won't arrive for ages).

First, the robot that came with the printer:

He didn't print very well, in fact his foot half fell off, but it wasn't a total disaster. I then realised that the file was an STL that was on the SD card and it has a print temperature of 200C. I don't print PLA at that temperature, for some reason all my printers work best at 220C. PETG seems to have a slightly higher print temperature than PLA. I tried a couple of my smaller parts with PETG at my PLA temperature: 220C:

That's a dehydrator knob and a thicknesser latch thingy and both printed fine. No problems at all.

The layers look very similar to the PLA versions. The part does seem to have a little more flex in it compared to PLA.

My Panasonic lens fix was a success until I dropped it again, I then printed another part and fitted it, but it was a slightly different design and had a hole in it which caused too much flex for the contacts on the lens to reliably engage with the camera. It finally got to the pint where I couldn't use th elens, so I decided to fix the problem. I altered the model and printed a new part in PLA and an identical one in PETG. Of course, it's white not black as that was the PETG colour I bought:

The PETG part seems to be a bit more 'slippery' and this is useful on a lens mount, so the PETG part is better than the PLA one in this respect.

The PLA part doesn't seem to be quite as tidy as the PETG, but the difference in colour doesn't help the PLA.

The lens is now working with the PETG part, which is what I wanted. It looks like PETG is going to work for me in the same way I use PLA. Excellent.