You don't buy silk PLA to make gears. You buy it to show off. In February 2021 AzureFilm sent me a couple of sample spools, and their Silk Lila turned out soft as silk to the touch and beautiful on the shelf.
What silk PLA is for
Shiny, silky filaments are made for tabletops, vases and ornamental pieces, things that sit there and look good, not parts that face friction or wear. So this time I changed my usual review format and skipped most of the benchmarks. Only the CaliCat, which never misses a review: pretty much flawless, no stringing at all.
Dragons, shoes and vases
I printed a dragon I'd already made in other PLAs to compare, at 0.2 mm and 205 °C, with no special settings. The result was great. Then something hard: a tiny Michael Jordan shoe keyring at 0.16 mm. When I started it I thought it would never work, but with a little support underneath it came out well.
The vase you see at the start of the video was printed in vase mode at 0.2 mm, 0.8 extrusion width and slowly, around 40 mm/s. Probably one of the best vases I'd printed until then. After many requests, I also printed the "Arya" dragon, scaled up a bit. It took roughly five hours. There was a little stringing from the retraction settings, nothing you can't clean up afterwards, but the silk effect is gorgeous.
My favourite print was a female figure, printed entirely in vase mode (I censored it a bit for YouTube). It looks like a piece of art. Getting such a smooth effect isn't easy: you have to dial in the settings, but the PLA has to help you, and this one really does.
A couple of useful prints
I also printed one of my stackable desk drawers in silk, and of course it looks great. An iPhone 8 stand came out decent. It was one of my first prints with this spool, so the temperature probably wasn't right yet, but at 30% infill it's solid and the charging cable passes through.
I was printing on my Artillery Genius, which had already spoiled me after a couple of months. At the time, a 1 kg spool cost around 20 to 22 euros including shipping on AzureFilm's website.