My second go with wood filament, and this time I had enough to really test it. In April 2021 AzureFilm's Bamboo Wood PLA printed even better than the pine one, and it filled my studio with the smell of a house with a fireplace.
Nozzle first
With my first AzureFilm wood (pine) I only had a small sample. This time I could print vases, miniatures and something better than the usual CaliCat. The filament is about 40% wood, so it's quite abrasive. I fitted a 0.6 mm stainless steel nozzle (Triangle Lab, cheap on AliExpress) to my Artillery Sidewinder X1. A brass one is fine too, as long as it's at least 0.6 mm.
Finding the settings
My first two Benchys were awful, full of stringing at 220 °C. The sweet spot was 210 °C (208–210), bed at 70 °C, fan fully on, and a raft on anything with a small footprint. With a raft you'll never have adhesion problems. I usually print wood at 50 mm/s.
On the grumpy bunny I doubled the retraction from 2.5 to 5 mm on the X1, and there was very little stringing. Layer adhesion is amazing. You forget you're printing wood.
Vases and a home for my CaliCats
With the 0.6 nozzle I printed vase mode at 1.2 mm line width, doubling it as I like to. It took two and a half hours and came out very sturdy, with layers melting beautifully together. A textured bowl only needed 0.8 mm because the pattern already makes it strong. My last vase was a gamble in vase mode; I slowed to 35 mm/s and it really surprised me.
Then I finally found a grumpy bunny with glasses I'd seen on Instagram, a support-free model, and printed him some coloured glasses too. My kids loved it. And since I have 20 or 30 CaliCats around the house, I resized a pen-holder model into a CaliCat container. There's an overhang of over a centimetre with no support, so it's not perfect there, but it looks great.
This bamboo PLA really looks and smells like wood, and once the settings are dialled in it prints just like PLA.