Weird issue with PC printing

[kmanstudios 1,120]

I have a spool of PC material, black, that was purchased recently. It was not recognized by the printer (maybe old spool?) and had some odd behaviour. It was a simplified dolphin I made for a larger project. I wanted the PC because of the strength and ability to really grind on it when sanding and finishing/polishing.

I did a test print at 0.2MM and it seemed fine. When I tried to take it down to 0.1mm it failed a lot. It seemed that the support (Raft and supports were PC) structure was not sticking to the raft. Just a lot of dragging around and spaghetti all over the place.

I finally got it to work using PVA (Believe it or not) as the support with a PVA brim. I just made sure that there was a super tiny part of the model that touched the buildplate to help it stay anchored. But the rest of the print is doing ok at this time.

In about 2.5 hours I will be putting the other print (second dolphin) on to see if the same PVA thing worked or not.

But I did have several consistent failures over the course of 16 hours with the PC Raft and support with the support seeming to not stick to the raft.

I did try to slow it down a lot (down to 30mm/s) and increased the temp, lowered the temp, flow increase just made more spaghetti, and a few other things such as rotating the model to affect the amount or size of the supports and playing with support settings. Left my front cover on, took it off, all gave the same result.

It did work with the 0.2 mm settings. Not the 0.1mm settings. Same model, same position to start off with. I am scratching my head over this. Any ideas?

Edit: Print finished ok and soaking the print off the buildplate. Just now starting second dolphin with same settings. Fingers crossed.....

Edited August 27, 2017 by Guest

[kmanstudios 1,120]

Well, I managed to get the dolphins printed with the PC material and PVA as a support.

The PVA came off really easy since I could heat the water a lot more than normal. Just peeled right off.

The buildplate shows that I am not using ooze shields or priming towers in a lot of cases. I get a bit of junk to cut off with the x-acto, but usually not too bad. Those prints are really strong.