Have you looked at other Ultimaker materials?
There is a wide range of materials, which covers a lot of applications. If you stick to Ultimaker materials, and Ultimaker software (Cura), you will get the most out of your printer. In most cases no tuning is necessary, leading to a hassle free experience.
And yes, Ultimaker materials are more expensive than many other materials. Not necessarily because they are better, but because there's 6 FTE working on these materials and their printing profiles.
Of course I am preaching for the choir (I work for Ultimaker).
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gr5 2,271
Ug. Well I'm biased as I sell these but I'd buy a 3dsolex hardcore with swappable nozzles so you don't have to throw away a print core - that way you can take the nozzle out and clean it or worst case just throw away the nozzle.
So ABS will bake into a kind of gum if it gets too hot for too long. 255C for 10 minutes should be plenty to make a core useless. Only fix is to take it apart which is difficult as these are delicate. Or buy a new one. So I recommend sticking closer to the 240C end of the range. 270C is just asking for trouble. But if you go any cooler than 240C (and even at 240C) it's hard to get good layer bonding and your parts can look and feel fine but they are actually quite weak along layer boundaries. So ABS has a narrow printing temp range (unlike PLA). This is reason #16 and #17 why ABS is not an easy material to work with.
If you are doing dual materials with HIPS then you want the cool temperature of ABS to be way down near 200C. or lower. I don't have enough experience with this to know - I've only done one dual filament ABS print on UM2 and it came out fine - I didn't touch the profile temps. But if ABS is sitting at say 220C for a few minutes while printing HIPS it *might* clog. Probably not at 220C for just 5 minutes but still... did you use the default profile temps for ABS cool down temp?
Anyway your clogs might have nothing to do with this if you are printing at 240C. It might be that it's grinding for other reasons. I really doubt your problem is dust. It's more likely that you are creating clogs because ABS is too hot for too long or grinding for other reasons. You could just be printing it a bit too fast or with too many retractions. You don't want the same piece of filament going through the feeder over and over more than 10 times or so. Typically PLA has issues around 20 times through the feeder so limiting that to 10 is good for PLA. I would expect ABS to be slightly more flexible and less likely to grind up so I would expect it could also handle 10X through the feeder but some prints like vornoi and all kinds of prints sometimes have excessive retractions so check that as well.
Anyway... some things to think about.
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gr5 2,271
Oh. Why ABS? I guess my first advice would be to stay away from ABS. If you need high temp materials maybe consider ngen? ABS is harder to print and it tends to be weaker than PLA. It warps and shrinks more. It creates bad fumes while printing. If you need a higher glass temp material there are other options - nGen from colorfab is a good intermediate glass temp material - higher glass temp (not as high as ABS or nylon) but still easy to print like PLA. Not sure if it works with pva or hips though.
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gr5 2,271
Does 80C bed work okay with buildtak? I find with larger ABS parts I need a bed temp of at least 100C. 105C is better. Otherwise the corners tend to warp/lift off the glass.
Also I hope you use a front cover and top cover to keep the air warm. This has nothing to do with clogging though. And keep the fan at 1% or you will get bad layer bonding.
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gr5 2,271
Oh! S3D! Does S3D lower the temp of the non-printing nozzle? That is a critical feature of Cura.
Also consider printing at half the speed you have been printing. If you print too fast you get high pressures in the nozzle and that can cause grinding. For a .4mm nozzle a safe volume (for testing) would be 3 cubic mm/sec.
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DF-Werkzeugservice 9
Hi,
thanks for the answers! I've ordered two 3DSolex yesterday (even at your gr5store, as the printer and me are in the US
), I hope it will not only make the unclogging easyier but also prevent the clogging due to its nozzle geometry without loosing printing speed.
I have to use ABS because the parts will be used as templates for manufacturing processes where we suppose they might fall down to the floor sometimes. In a couple of tries we have figured out that PLA just breaks to easy for that.
I haven't tried NGen yet, but I'll give it a try if nothing else helps. But we have already lots of big FF spools in stock, so I really would prefer to use them.
I have figured out that 80 °C with BuildTak is for my application the right thing. The ABS bonds really strong to it, I have nearly no issues with warping (I got a cover and door, of course). If i go hotter with the build plate, the HIPS supports close to the plate get soft and this occurs in high warping of supported areas.
I can use idle temperatures in S3D, but I haven't done yet. As you told me, it would really make sense to use them, I'll try this now.
Thank you!
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