So I’ve been on an ABS kick, I’ve upgraded the crap out of my ender 5 just for this purpose, better hotend, better build plate and heaters, full enclosure, the works. I’ve had the worst luck with every single print warping no matter what. That is until I learned about ABS juice, suddenly my prints were gasp Sticking to the plate. I know, amazing. Soon as printing all sorts of little things, flat things, tall things, skinny things. But there’s one thing I hadn’t tried, big things. Not I decided to go for broke, and I don’t exactly know what the difference may have been here, it might be that the ABS is about a year old even though I kept it inside of a cupboard it may have still absorbed some moisture or something
. But I get about halfway through this print, and I swear to God I was pretty sure that it was sticking to the build plate just fine when I hear some cracking. I look over and I see all these little lines starting to form, I’m about halfway through and there’s no way I have enough ABS to print the rest of it so I figured just wait and see what it comes up with. Now I’m pretty sure I can make some ABS slurry to maybe fill in the cracks and make it usable enough for my girlfriend, it’s just a book rest. But I would like to figure out what happened here and how to prevent it in the future.
Do any of you guys who have more experience with abs know what might have gone wrong?
Main variables for this print are ABS obviously, 15% infill, 110⁰C build plate, 250⁰c hotend, 240⁰c near the end to try and lower the temperature differential to try to prevent the layer splitting. Entire print speed was set to 60steps and 20 steps for infill with 110% flow rate.
Entire print was . 28mm layer height
Do you happen to know what your chamber temperature was? Ideally, you want to be at 60C to minimize stress cracks like that. ABS shrinks as it cools and will rip itself apart depending on the geometry of the part. My large printer needed a fan blowing on the bed to get reliable ABS prints. Well worth it though because ABS is a joy to post-process.
For bed adhesion, I use a small amount of Nano Polymer Adhesive on textured PEI for my ABS prints.
No I don’t, I bought a bunch of thermistors that I could use to measure the chamber temp at different heights but I have yet to research how to install that into my board
I don’t have a guide or anything but it should be quite easy to use something like an ESP8266 or ESP32 to measure the temps (maybe check out ESPHome) which can then be displayed on a small TFT screen or via wifi
Do you know if that can be monitored through octoprint by chance?
Yes, octoprint has support for chamber temperature sensors. But the Question is, does you printer and firmware support it?
(Klipper might be a great upgrade for another day)
I don’t know. I just have a lot of experience with ESP devices outside of the 3D printing sphere and know they’re very handy/useful for stuff like this.