(Mis)Adventures in 3d Printing: ABS Benchy Ahoy

Benchy's ahoy: Misadventures in open air ABS printing...

Whoa..... thats a lot of Benchy's

So... if you squint hard and look towards the top left you can see wood filament blur that would be the first ever "Benchy", the good ship printer torture test, I printed. It came out great. Around labor day I decided to grab a few spools of filament from MakerGeeks grab bag deal and for some reason I selected ABS as one of the surprise rolls. In came this nice red that my better half locked onto for an "Adalinda". You may have seen a couple of silver ones from my early prints on the new Prusa.

Now... I knew the getting a high quality print out of the Prusa with ABS was going to be hard. I decided early on I was not going to try and mess with it with the printrbot. But the quality of the printer parts for the Prusa which are made on Prusas gave me some hope I could do it. Now... based on that hard earned scruffy but more or less intact Benchy at the end of that long long loooong line of much scruffier or complete abortion Benchys  I have decided ABS can wait until I have an enclosure to better control the temp. Within some limits I think I could make some useful parts. Not sure how MakerGeeks ABS stacks up. For any that are interested that last print was actually at their recommended 245, with PRUSA stock simplify 3d abs settings (purse slicer edition had most of the epic fails) with mods to a skirt/breeze shield for the first 45 layers and a bed temp of 100 instead of 110. The biggest problem was the overhang of the bow... it inevitably started curling early and often the probe or head would catch on it and skip the belt leading to a shifted print.

A lot of the failures in the line were due to I D 10 T problems. When trying to get the Z offset closer to the bed I was moving it farther away and it took me a while to figure it out because I was messing with some other settings at the same time like flow rates etc... Great case of going faster meaning going slower in the end.

After I figured that out I started getting much better results for bed adhesion. But 10 or so layers in the bow point layers would lift even if the bow corner stayed stuck which is the nail in the coffin for now. Tried hotter. Tried cooler. Tried keeping it the same (no first layer difference) etc... Ultimately hit a damned if a did and damned if I didn't state where I just couldn't solve all problems. Getting it stuck took a lot of heat. But when I got it cool enough to handle the overhangs in the door/bridging etc... the bow section layers would bow worse. If I heated it up to hold the curling at bay it would melt on the short slower sections at the top. Swapping to S3d slicing vs the Prusa slic3r slicer helped but couldn't go much slower in those sections.

All that said... the toughness of the ABS material has me wanting to setup an enclosure of some sort to try this with a bit more controlled environment. PLA is pretty easy to print in and you can do a lot of cool things with it. But it is fragile when it comes to any drops. Pretty much assured if there is anything remotely fragile about a print it will get damaged in a fall. ABS is a lot more resilient . I have some PETG which is similar... but not wanting to risk my PEI bed while they are not easily replaced.

To make a long story short... as many before me have learned so to now do I know and try and pass on the nugget of knowledge that is... Don't print ABS in the open air unless you have a warm draft free room to do the printing in. Recommended ambient is around 30c (86f). A plastic tent and heat lamp will do it in a pinch. I ran across many on forums saying they use large storage bins placed over the top while printing.

So that has been a frustrating past few days. But I have also had some other pretty big fun prints. Finally got around to one I have been wanting to do for a while and I will talk about in more detail later but here is the pic...

Hovalin open design full size violin. Yes it plays. .