I wanted to print some tokens for a boardgame which need different colors. I don’t need that much colored filament. I came across that set while searching for cheap filament. Is that a good deal or would it be better to just buy full spools, even if I dont know what to use it for?
The answer to your question is going to be in calculating how much is not much.
Depending how many tokens you need, each of those little loops of filament might not be sufficient. Those appear to be 5 meters of each color which works out to just about 40 grams of material. What you’re looking at is designed for use in those 3D extrusion pens, not a printer, so depending on your printer you’ll probably also have to transfer these little scraps of filament… one at a time… to empty spools in order to get it to feed. And I know for a fact on my printer the entire filament path from the spool holder to the print head is the better part of a meter to begin with (it’s about 29 inches, all told) which would also be a pain in the butt.
Stick one of your objects in your slicer and slice it, and part of the output down there in the bottom right corner should be the estimated amount of material, in grams, you will need for each one. Or if you want to think of it that way, PLA is 1.24 grams per cubic centimeter.
If you are using a low infill percentage and either don’t need many tokens, or you’re okay with them all being a hodgepodge of colors, you may still be able to get away with this. But you should definitely verify that first.
You can buy filament multipacks that are four quarter kilo spools rather than one full kilo spool pretty easily, which might be a better bet. Something like this, although a lot of brands do something similar.
Edit: Fuck it, I did the math.
Using the files provided in your link, and I adjusted the infill to 100% because the author’s recommended setting of 96% makes no sense – it’s near enough to 100% to make very little difference, and such a high ratio would print like trash with most infill patterns anyway.
I will leave other infill ratios as an exercise for the reader. Also, this does not account for any attempts at multi-color printing which will inherently produce some waste material.
So, how many of these do you need? Is this like, a 100 each kind of thing? Or just 10 or 15?