This has to be have been one of the weirdest decisions of my business career but here it goes: Blastersmiths UK cannot offer black 3D printed products until further notice. If you've paid for black parts and have them outstanding, you'll likely get an email shortly offering you a refund or choice of other colours.
Why is this cropping up now? Well, story time. The closure was triggered by contaminated black filament bricking our entire suite. We literally lost entire printers to a gunky mass of dust and otherwise contaminated PLA. It did all sorts of numbers on our hardware. We had to strip down, clear, rebuild and reconfigure large chunks of it to get ourselves operational again. Those printers would literally not print because of damaged parts caused by contaminated filament. We've done that over the last 2 or 3 weeks. The printers had been functioning solidly for 24 hours before we made yesterday's announcement across a range of colours. The premium black we were using was flowing fine and all was good. Then after a fixed number of printer hours, our hot ends started refusing to print black - of any brand or quality. We were able to reproduce the bug and we can confirm that our hot ends will not feed black filament past 2 hours of printer time, irrespective of contamination. They will clog, we clear them out and swap to another colour and everything prints fine. We can even switch back to black each time and get another 2 hours. The window between the start of printing in black and the first failure was ~24 hours but now we're down to a reproducible window of roughly 2 hours. Sadly rotating through colours is not sustainable as the failure often occurs mid print resulting in lots of wasted time and filament.
We have no idea why this bug has cropped up now when we've printed dozens of kilos of black filament in the past year. We are in touch with our hot end manufacturers and both filament suppliers to see what's what. The bug is sensitive to the quality of filament, too: the premium grade stuff we're using as a stop gap has a better half-life than the last of the known good bulk stuff but the bug is still there. The weirdest part is every other colour we can print does that - it prints! To that end, we can only offer non-black parts until we resolve this.
On the bright side, I've got some silver and brass filaments I'm going to be adding to the options to widen the array of colours available. I'll be looking to add more in the coming days.
As weird bugs go, this one takes the biscuit. We really are scratching our heads on this one. :D Black parts will be restored to the website as soon as we've fixed this bug...
-Mike Harratt
Blastersmiths UK
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