TPU Shore Hardness Explained: 70A vs. 80A vs. 85A vs. 90A vs. 95A

Scroll through Filazoo's TPU shelf and you'll see five numbers staring back at you: 70A, 80A, 85A, 90A, 95A. If you've never printed flexible filament before, that "A" might as well be a random letter grade. It isn't. It's a real, measurable property that tells you almost everything about how a spool of TPU will feel and behave before you ever load it.

Think of 95A as a skateboard wheel or a shoe sole — flexible, but still structured enough to hold a shape under load. Think of 70A as closer to a rubber band or a stress ball — soft, stretchy, and happy to deform under light pressure. Everything Filazoo stocks sits somewhere on that spectrum, and picking the right point on it is the difference between a phone case that protects your phone and a phone case that flops around like a wet noodle. Get the hardness wrong in either direction and the part fails at its one job — too firm and it can't absorb an impact, too soft and it can't hold the shape it needs to protect anything at all.

What Shore A Hardness Actually Measures

Shore hardness comes from a durometer test: a small, spring-loaded pin is pressed into the material's surface, and the depth of indentation is converted into a number on the Shore scale. The A scale specifically applies to soft-to-medium flexible materials — rubbers, elastomers, and flexible plastics like TPU. There's also a Shore D scale for harder plastics, which is why you'll sometimes see rigid materials rated in D rather than A — but everything in Filazoo's TPU lineup uses the A scale, since all of it falls in the flexible-material range that scale was built to measure.

Higher numbers mean the pin sinks in less, which means the material resists deformation more. Lower numbers mean the pin sinks in further, which means the material is softer and compresses more easily under the same force. The scale runs from 0 (essentially liquid) to 100 (essentially rigid), so the 70–95 range Filazoo carries sits toward the firmer end of what's generally considered "flexible" filament — none of it is as soft as, say, a silicone phone grip you might find in a hardware store, but all of it is genuinely flexible compared to PLA, PETG, or any rigid engineering material.

It's worth separating hardness from flexibility, because people use those words interchangeably and they aren't quite the same thing. Hardness describes resistance to indentation — basically, how firm the material feels when you press on it with a fingertip. Flexibility describes how easily a part bends or flexes along its length under a bending force. The two are related (softer materials generally flex more easily) but not identical: wall thickness, infill percentage, and part geometry affect how flexible a printed object feels just as much as the raw Shore rating of the filament itself. A thin-walled 95A part can flex more than a thick-walled 85A part printed with heavy infill. Shore hardness tells you about the material; your design tells you about the part.

That distinction matters when you're troubleshooting a print that doesn't feel right. If a part you designed to be firm feels too floppy, the problem might not be the wrong hardness grade at all — it might be wall thickness or infill that's too low for the geometry. Conversely, a part that feels stiffer than expected on a soft grade might just need thinner walls to let the material actually flex the way it's rated to.

All of Filazoo's TPU is sold as 1.75 mm filament with the same ±0.02 mm diameter tolerance as the rest of the catalog, so hardness is genuinely the variable you're choosing between here — not diameter consistency or feed reliability, which stay constant across the whole line.

Filazoo's Five TPU Grades Side-by-Side

Here's how the five hardness levels compare in practical terms, based on how each is formulated and positioned in the Filazoo catalog.

Grade	Feel	Typical Use	Print Difficulty
95A	Firm, still noticeably flexible — closest to a shoe sole or skateboard wheel	Phone cases, protective covers, gaskets, wearable-adjacent parts that need to hold shape	Easiest of the five — most predictable feeding and the most forgiving on standard extruders
90A	Softer flex and stronger cushioning than 95A	Grips, bumpers, cable boots, semi-flexible enclosures	Slightly more care needed with retraction and speed than 95A
85A	High elasticity, built for repeated bending and compression	Straps, hinges, protective sleeves, parts that flex again and again in use	Moderate — benefits from a short, well-managed filament path
80A	Deep flex with a soft-touch response	Highly compliant parts, soft grips, some cosplay and costume components	More demanding — slower speeds and careful retraction matter more
70A	Maximum softness, closest to a rubber band or stress ball	Rubber-like prototypes, soft seals, novelty and sensory items	Most demanding grade to print well — needs a controlled setup

Notice the pattern: as Shore hardness drops, printability generally gets more demanding. Softer filament is more prone to buckling in the extruder path, especially on printers without a well-supported feed line. That's not a reason to avoid the softer grades — plenty of makers print 70A successfully — but it does mean your printer's setup matters more at the bottom of this range than at the top. If you're printing TPU for the first time, starting with 95A and working your way down as your setup and technique improve is a reasonable, low-frustration way to learn the material rather than diving straight into 70A on your very first flexible print.

It's also worth thinking about price and spool weight alongside hardness when you're planning a project. Softer, more specialized TPU tends to sit at a higher price point than the firmer 95A end of the range, partly reflecting the more demanding formulation and partly reflecting lower production volume. If a project could reasonably work with either 90A or 85A, factoring in which one you'll actually print successfully — and which one fits the budget for the quantity you need — is a fair part of the decision alongside pure feel.

Glossy vs. Matte vs. Foam — the Other Variable

Hardness isn't the only choice you're making. Within several of Filazoo's TPU grades, you'll also see a finish option: Glossy, Matte, or Foam.

Glossy and Matte describe surface finish, the same way they do on Filazoo's PLA lines — glossy TPU has a smoother, more reflective surface, while matte TPU softens the sheen and tends to hide fingerprints and layer lines a little better on visible parts. Neither finish changes the Shore rating; a TPU-95A Glossy and a TPU-95A Matte spool are the same hardness, just different surface treatments. If a part will be handled constantly — a phone case is the obvious example — matte's fingerprint-hiding property is a real practical advantage over glossy, independent of anything to do with flex or hardness.

Foam is a different variable entirely, available in the 70A through 90A range. Foam TPU is formulated to expand slightly during printing, producing a lighter, more cushioned structure than solid TPU at the same nominal hardness. That makes it useful anywhere you want padding without adding weight — insoles, cushioned grips, protective padding inserts — applications where solid TPU would feel too dense or add too much mass. Foam TPU behaves differently in the nozzle than solid TPU, since the expansion behavior changes how the material flows and cools compared to a solid, non-expanding formulation, so it's worth treating it as its own category rather than assuming your solid-TPU profile will transfer directly. Print speed and cooling that work well for solid 90A Glossy won't necessarily be the right starting point for 90A Foam — plan on a small test piece before committing to a full print with a foam grade you haven't used before.

One more distinction worth knowing: because Foam TPU is a structural, expansion-based effect rather than a surface finish, it doesn't come in the same Glossy/Matte split that solid TPU does. What you're choosing with Foam is purely the underlying Shore grade (70A through 90A) plus the foam behavior itself, not a separate finish layered on top.

Matching Hardness to Project Type

A quick way to narrow the decision:

• Phone cases and protective shells: 95A. You want enough give to absorb an impact but enough structure that the case doesn't sag or lose its shape over time in a pocket or bag.
• Gaskets and seals: 90A to 95A. These need consistent compression against a mating surface — too soft and the seal can deform unevenly or squeeze out from under load; too firm and it won't compress enough to actually seal properly against the surface it's pressed to.
• Wearable straps and bands: 80A to 85A. You need real flex that moves with the body without fighting it, while still holding enough shape that the strap doesn't stretch out of form after repeated wear.
• Cushioning, grips, and padding: the Foam line, generally in the 80A to 90A range, where the goal is soft contact rather than structural flex — think of the difference between a firm grip that flexes and a soft grip that cushions.
• Soft, rubber-like novelty prints: 70A, where maximum give matters more than dimensional stability — stress toys, soft sensory items, and prototypes standing in for cast rubber parts.

If you're designing wearable armor pieces, straps, or costume components, our cosplay armor and props guide covers where TPU straps fit alongside rigid ASA and PETG shell pieces in a build — a common pattern is rigid ASA or PETG for the structural armor plates, with TPU straps and connectors at the joints where real flex is needed for movement and comfort.

Printing TPU Successfully

Every TPU grade shares a few real constraints, and they matter more as hardness drops. TPU is soft enough that it can buckle inside a long, loosely supported Bowden tube before it ever reaches the nozzle — the filament has nowhere to push against, so it kinks instead of feeding forward, especially under the pressure needed to extrude consistently. A short, direct filament path helps enormously, which is one reason direct-drive extruders tend to have an easier time with TPU than long-Bowden setups. If you're on a Bowden machine, minimizing slack in the tube, keeping the path as straight as possible, and making sure the tube is properly seated at both ends goes a long way toward preventing the buckling that causes inconsistent extrusion and skipped steps.

Retraction is the other lever that matters most. TPU's elasticity means aggressive retraction settings that work fine on PLA or PETG can cause it to compress and jam inside the extruder instead of pulling back cleanly — the filament essentially bunches up rather than retracting the way a rigid material would. Slower, shorter retraction moves — dialed in specifically for TPU rather than borrowed from a rigid-filament profile — are usually the fix. Print speed matters too: TPU generally wants a slower overall print speed than PLA or PETG, particularly around sharp corners and small features, where rapid direction changes put more strain on the soft filament path than it can reliably handle.

Bed adhesion tends to be less of an issue with TPU than with some rigid materials — its flexibility actually helps it grip a textured or slightly rough bed surface well — but because TPU parts can be hard to remove cleanly without warping if they're over-adhered, testing adhesion on a small piece before committing to a large print is worth the extra few minutes. Our retraction tuning guide walks through the process step by step if you're setting up a TPU profile for the first time, and the same general approach — start conservative, test, and adjust in small increments — applies whether you're working with 95A or something softer like 70A.

Decision Table: Quick Reference

If you need...	Choose
A protective case that holds its shape	TPU-95A Glossy or Matte
A gasket or compression seal	TPU-95A or TPU-90A
A flexible strap or hinge	TPU-85A Glossy or Matte
Cushioning without added weight	TPU-80A, 85A, or 90A Foam
Maximum softness for a rubber-like part	TPU-70A Matte or Foam

Filazoo carries all five Shore grades across Glossy, Matte, and Foam finishes, so you can match hardness to the job instead of compromising with whatever TPU happens to be on hand. If you're building a project that pairs flexible TPU with rigid structural parts — cosplay armor is a common example — start with the cosplay and props guide, then dial in your retraction settings before your first flexible print using our retraction tuning guide.