Flashforge Creator 5 VS. PEBA Flexible Filament

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]Special thanks to Justway for sponsoring today's video. Welcome to Figure Feedback. My name is Jeremy and today I'm going to share with you what my experience has been like using flexible filaments in the Flash Forge Creator 5.

[00:00:13]Now, if you're not familiar with this printer, is a four tool head 3D printer which will not only let you print with flexible materials like TPU or in my case PBA, but also your regular PLA and PETGS and different variants of that.

[00:00:28]And the biggest advantage of having four tool heads is that when you switch in between those different filaments, there is absolutely no purge waste. And that will also allow you to do things like support interfaces. So you'll be able to use PLA as a support interface for TPU.

[00:00:46]So you can have a lot easier support removals if you're printing something that happens to need to use supports.

[00:00:53]And you can just ignore this over here.

[00:00:56]And this is the In Cubic Cobra 4. Uh, it has nothing to do with this video, but I didn't feel like moving it. So, don't worry about this. This is for a future video. So, before I get into the experience of using the flexible materials, I do want to quickly clear some things up about Flash Forge and the Creator 5 and their other printers because there's been some misinformation floating around the internet over the past few days and just kind of want to do my part in just stopping the spread of misinformation. So, one of the biggest things that I've been hearing is that Flash Forge has locked down their ecosystem, which means that you can't use any other slicer besides the ones that they want you to use, which in this case will be the newly releasleased Flash Studio. I'm here to tell you that's not true. It is absolutely not true at all. I have other Flash Forge printers including the 5M Pro that is fully updated to the latest firmware that Flash Forge offers and it works just fine in Orca Slicer. Okay, I can still connect to LAN. I can still log in with the IP address and I can still send prints remotely. So, no, they haven't locked down anything. And also, there is a new version of Orca Slicer right now that's still in alpha. It is version 2.4.0.

[00:02:17]And in that particular version are profiles for the Creator 5 and the Creator 5 Pro. All right. So you don't have to worry about that. It's not locked down. All right. So that's going to be it for now on that. All right. So let's talk about the flexible materials.

[00:02:37]So the flexible material that I have tried out with this is Pebba. Pebba is something that's similar to TPU, but it's also just a little bit different.

[00:02:45]Some people prefer it um because it can print faster than TPU. Um the flow rate for the particular filament that I'm using, which is from a company called Symbotron, can print at a flow rate of more than twice the speed of a regular generic TPU. The exact flow rates for the filament escapes me for the moment, but I will put that on the screen so that you can see it. But just like TPU, it is very very hyroscopic, which means it absorbs moisture pretty quickly. And since we are in the summer days right now and humidity is just rising, especially where I am, it is highly advised that you use something like a filament dryer. This is one of the filament dryer box that I have to the G2 systems uh filament dryer that I have.

[00:03:34]It allows me to print with four different filaments at once. And this is just one of the containers here. And for this particular filament, it's recommended that you dry it uh pretty much like 12 to 16 hours up to about 60° um Celsius. And then also as you're printing, you continue to run the dryer in order to get the best result. So I was able to feed this to the left side of the printer. And when you're feeding the filament through these channels here, since it's so flexible, it's so stretchy, you know, you're going to have to work with it a little bit because, you know, it's just not as stiff. But it locks in just fine. Then I started a test print for it. And I just wanted to do a little bit of a little cube. And here's the cube that I printed. And the filament was not really all that dry when I started doing this. I just wanted to see if it would work. and it came out, you know, just fine. It's a nice squishy cube. I gave this some lightning infill, so it's pretty hollow on the inside, but the whole point is it's nice and it's squishy. All right, that's the whole point of Pebba. It can be squishy.

[00:04:46]You can just kind of just hit it on the ground or on a table like this. And depending on what you're printing, you know, it's not going to, you know, break and shatter and do things like that. So, this was a confirmation that the Pebba was going to work. If you already tried printing with flexible materials at home, then you already know how tricky they can be. And that's where Just Way comes in because they not only offer professional TPU 3D printing, but they also handle injection molding in case you ever want to scale a project from prototype to full production. Another thing I like about Justway is that they cover pretty much the entire workflow for makers, engineers, and small businesses. So whether you need highdetailed resin prints, durable functional parts, laser cutting, CNC machined aluminum components, or even good old flexible TPU prints that are going to come out clean and consistent, they can handle it all in one place. I'm pretty sure we can all agree that having access to both CNC machining and professional 3D printing under one service can save a ton of time. So, if you want to bring a project to life without spending weeks trying to figure out how to do it yourself on your computer and printer or machining parts in your garage yourself, check out Just and see what they can make for you. So, the next thing I decided to do was print these little masks that I saw over on Maker World. These are like kid masks and they have like different superheroes and stuff on them. And this is I printed two of the same ones. And this is just a little Spider-Man mask here. And again, I didn't completely dry the filament before I started doing this. I was kind of antsy. So, there's some stringing on here, but the back looks pretty cool.

[00:06:30]And it's got like these holes that you can put strings on and then the kids can kind of just put them on their face, you know? So, it's just it's flexible, you know. So, after I printed some of these, I was like, "Okay, I'm I'm going to wait overnight to dry the filament. And then I want to print a bouncy tennis ball."

[00:06:50]And I decided to use two different colors of Pebba. It's going to be red and it was going to be black. And then for support interface, I also brought in some regular old PLA to act as the support interface. And this print went overnight. So, as you can see, it came away from the supports pretty easily, but then I had all of that extra PLA material on the bottom. Here's how it looks now. I managed to get um the bit the most of it off of the top. It wasn't difficult just with some flush cutters and it was coming away pretty good cuz the PLA and the PBA, they don't stick together very well, right? And I realized that what I had done was I thought that I blocked off the filament from uh making supports on the inside all the way around. I thought it was just going to be supports on the outside surface, but that wasn't the case. So, here at the bottom of the tennis ball, there's some support material that's on the inside that I was able to reach in there and pull out kind of really easily pull out some of the uh tree support tips. But that's all I'm going to do.

[00:07:59]I'm not going to do the rest of them.

[00:08:00]So, you know, that was a user error on my part. I just had to make sure that the supports are only on the outside and not on the inside. But as a bouncy and quite hard tennis ball, you can see that bouncing. I hope I don't hit one of my figurines back here. But this is the great thing about Pebba.

[00:08:22]You know, it just bounces and it bounces. And this thing is not going to deform. is not going to break. It's not going to shatter. I printed with this stuff before. Larger like basketball, little mini basketballs and little tennis balls like this. They've been played with outside, inside, thrown, kicked or whatever. They're still in perfect condition. So, this came out really, really good. And I am just so happy with this little ball here. Like I said, it took 10 hours. So, you know, using the multicolor pebba filament in this machine, you know, it totally works. But I do have to warn you. I do have to warn you about flexible filaments, in particular, the softer ones. Now, this Pebble was 9A. That was the shore hardness. So, it's not as stiff as 95A, but Flash for says, and also on the menu for this printer, it says that it can print 98 TPU. Now, granted, maybe the TPU that they're referring to is a little bit stiffer than the Pebble, but the problem that you should definitely look out for is when you want to take the filament out, you have to squeeze the filament cutter on the tool head. It cuts the filament and then you can pull the filament out.

[00:09:37]The problem is on the red filament, it cut it and I was able to release it. I had to pull the filament cutter a few times for it to actually get through, but the black filament did not want to be cut. No matter how many times I squeeze that tool head cutter, it would not cut at all. So, I decided to just cut it myself with a pair of flush cutters right above where the opening is to go down into the hotend so that it can reach the nozzle. And in doing that, it pretty much assured that the pebba that was still in there that was super stringy, it could not pass through the nozzle and it actually got jammed up in the pathway of the filament cutter. So, in order to clear that, I needed to take the tool head apart, and I needed to take off the arm of the filament cutter to get to the gears where I could take that really gnarled up pebble out. And I did a whole video right before this one.

[00:10:43]You can check that out as well. I'll leave a card on the screen, a link in the description to show you how to take the tool head apart. I show you how you can change the nozzle. It'll tell you how you can take the filament AR cutter arm off, how you can take the blade out and put everything back together. And it is surprisingly simple to do. So, Flash Fors did a good job as far as the um access when it comes to getting into these tool heads and checking things out. It is not as complicated and scary as you may think.

[00:11:16]But yeah, I was able to clear that blockage and then everything flows nice and smooth now. So that's just something to be aware of. So from what I understand, these printers are starting to ship to people and some people have already received theirs. So yeah, have at it. Experiment with as many different filaments as you want. And if you have this printer and you've tried some TPU or software flexible filaments, let us know down in the comments what your uh experience with that has been. And hopefully it was as good as mine was, minus the part where I had to take the tool head down to get the broken and very elastic pebba out. So, that's going to do it for now. If you want to see more videos about the Creator 5 or even the upcoming video on the Cobra 4 combo, uh, be sure to subscribe because, uh, those are going to be coming out really soon. So until then, thank you all so much for watching first of all and until next time, take care of yourselves and I'll speak to you