Ultimaker S5 Print Quality with ABS

[nickridley 0]

We have a large and urgent print job here and have purchased two S5s to help us along. So far the experience is not great. We chose ABS material because we understood that the print quality would be good combined with good strength of the final result - these parts will be used in a working product prototype.

 

We're attempting to print large hollow parts - approx 250mm x 250mm a 150mm with 2mm to 3mm walls which will be filled with PU resin for final strength and rigidity.

 

I know comparison between 3D printer manufacturers can be a bit emotive but the difference between the performance of the S5s vs a Zortrax M300 is marked. With 'standard settings from Cura 3.5.1 and 0.4 Cores the print times are excruciatingly slow compared with the Zortrax equipped with a similar nozzle size using HIPS material. We changed out the Cores to 0.8 and again used the recommended settings in Cura 3.5.1 to speed things up and understood that print quality would suffer but...

 

The prints are very untidy on the S5 no 1: IMG_0814 and 0815. Lots of strings and blobs to the point that supports are being tripped over by the extrusion head and detached. Surface finish is generally very poor. We've had to pause and glue the supports back on twice and added some sticky putty to add stability. IMG_0817 is from S5 no 2: Set to slower print head speed to attempt to get a better finish but still a bit of a mess. This is only the first half an hour of print and already we can hear the print head is tripping up on blobs of material.

 

Compare with the print from our Z300. This just runs without a hiccup and produces really nice prints time after time.

 

Has anyone got experience using ABS on the S5? Can you recommend any settings that might improve things? 

 

My feeling is the big difference here is that the Zortrax filament feeder is at the extrusion head whereas the Ultimaker is on the back of the printer casing. When the head traverses between lay-downs over the longer distances on larger models, material is still flowing through the nozzle and produces a blob at the start of the next run. Still doesn't fully explain the general poor quality through...