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Another PHA print! A trackball upgrade (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 week ago by MxRemy@piefed.social to c/3dprinting@lemmy.ml
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Upgraded my Adept trackball to use the AnyBall 57-68mm mod, with an Aramith tournament series cue ball and Rexroth BTUs.

Sorry for constantly proselytizing about the wonders of PHA lol. But look at this thing! The Adept is pretty ingeniously designed for printing, but I wouldn't really say it's an easy print either. There are steeeeep overhangs and really long bridges. After getting the settings dialed in, PHA more or less handled it just fine, and now my trackball is home compostable. It also has this really interesting feel to it, kind of reminds me more of leather than plastic.

Few more pics:

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[-] IMALlama@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Where do you source your PHA? I looked around a year or so ago, but the options were fairly sparse.

[-] MxRemy@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago

It's still that way unfortunately... but I think selection will start getting better soon! Right now there's AllPHA, and the new EcoGenesis that I think recently spun off from the now defunct BeyondPlastic. But there's a new line with way better selection called PHA 3DESIGN with good color selection and cool composites.

To the best of my knowledge, all 3 of those are sourcing their raw materials from the same company, with PHA 3DESIGN being closest to the source? They're like a subsidiary or something. I've heard of a couple other companies gearing up to offer their own lines too, but it's unclear to me so far where it's sourced from. What we really need is for some awesome hobbyist to figure out how to spin up their own mini bioreactor setup and bring it in-house, but I wouldn't know where to begin unfortunately.

[-] IMALlama@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Thanks for the links!

Colorfabb lists products for sale and claims compostability in any environment. I am tempted to buy a spool and give it a go, including composting in my compost pile.

PHA 3DESIGN's website says their products are not home compostable :(

100% bio-based, blended from PHA and other bio-based materials, industrially compostable.

EcoGenesis's website spends a lot of time saying "PLA isn't compostable outside of very specific conditions", but doesn't appear to say that their product is more widely compostable. I also didn't see an obvious place to buy their filament or even really a listing of filaments.

[-] MxRemy@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago

Oh yeah, PHA3DESIGN sells both pure PHA and PHA/PLA blends, their pure stuff is (to the best of my understanding) fully home compostable. Any pure line of it should be, it's just a matter of some companies being sneaky about whether it's actually 100% PHA or not.

EcoGenesis I'm prettttyyyyy sure is pure PHA, mostly because they're the ones who usually call other people out when it's not. They ran spectrometry on this other brand (Regen) and posted publicly about it clearly being blended. Also their spools have labels with pretty hardcore and believable verification on them.

[-] Zoop@beehaw.org 2 points 1 week ago

How cool! That material sounds awesome and I love that it's compostable at home. Looks like you did a great job. Thank you for sharing, this is neat!

[-] MxRemy@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago

Thank youuuu, I'm super stoked about it!

this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
23 points (96.0% liked)

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