You’re saying ABS is printing easier for you than ASA? That’s interesting. From my limited understanding, ASA has the reputation of being easier to print.
What brands/blends? I’ve been printing basically only ASA and PETG for a little while now. Haven’t tried ABS.
It will decompose, but only it a hot compost pile.
To some extent, this means large scale composting, but you could theoretically do it at home if you live somewhere with four seasons (specifically fall) and have trees that drop leaves on your property or nearby. Let your grass get a bit taller as the trees start turning and mulch/bag the grass and leaf mixture. Bonus points if you have a ratio of 30 carbon (brown stuff) to 1 nitrogen (green stuff) by weight. “Normal” composting into. This is why big piles of fresh mulch get pretty warm and stream in the middle.
I don’t know what it would take to break down PLA in compost, but suspect it would take more time than a typical home pile if you manage to get it hot. It would probably be benefit from shredding to speed things up, as would the rest of the stuff in a typical compost pile. Amusingly, your PLA is probably ripe for getting whacked with a hammer, or a hammer mill.
That looks like under-extrusion to me.
Here’s the quick “tune your extruder” arc:
After you get #1, never touch it again unless you change things like your extruder gears. #2/#3 are a good idea whenever you start a new roll of filament, although I personally don’t bother unless I’m trying a new material, brand, or color.
The PWM signal once it starts getting jittery is basically only 0 or 100% and corresponds pretty well to the swings in temperature.
I’ve moved the head hot and cold by hand and haven’t gotten any weird behavior. Normally when I have a wire break there’s a very specific location that will reliably fail. That’s not the case this time.
I wouldn’t think so, the printer never did this previously. I need to put together some g-code to make the print head move around at a pretty high rate, but without actually extruding anything.
I suspect it’s motion/jiggling around related. I guess I could whip up some g-code to see what happens when the printer is still vs when it’s moving rapidly.
Thanks for the nudge, will follow up.
Agree that the result won’t be a perfect print, but I personally prefer this route over printing the other half, sanding the first half flat to account for a partial layer like you said, and then gluing.
I guess it comes down to what you goal is. 90% of my prints are functional and I don’t really care if they’re a bit ugly at times.
Do you have a pair of calipers that you can use to measure print height? If yes, don’t take it off the bed. Measure the height of the print, delete those layers out of the gcode (it’s just a text document after all), and reset. Note that the gcode and printer setup might require some fiddling to get right, but I’ve resumed prints like this without problems before. They don’t all look perfect at this layer, but they’re certain better than nothing. Once the print loses its hold on the bed, all bets are off.
Is the print stopping or does the printer keep going like all is well?
If the printer is continuing like everything is normal, you can surmise that the issue is either the heater, the extruder, or the filament path.
What does your temp graph look like during the print? Oscillations = potential wiring issue, especially if they’re not present for the whole print.
Have you caught the printer doing this? Is the extruder clicking? If yes, something is preventing the filament from moving through the extruder. You’re either developing a clog or something is preventing the filament from feeding (binding, etc).
If the extruder isn’t clicking, and the print continues for a bit, does the extruder slowly chew through the filament? If yes, you probably need more tension on the feed screw. I would still suggest looking for souces of binding.
Tons of incremental updates.
Based on the printer in the picture I think you have one of the answers, lol.
The other answer is slicers, but if you’re using Bambu’s you’ve also seen that change now.
I agree that building a Voron is a project. I had a Pursa I3 clone (knockoff) that I used to print most of my parts on. If you don’t already have a 3D printer you can use the Print it Forward program to get printed parts shipped to you. Parts aside, your first build will take an easy 20-40 hours. This isn’t because the build is hard, it’s just that the build is long - especially if you want to have your wiring just-so. On the upside, you’ll have a very good knowledge of how your printer operates at a physical and firmware+Klipper config level once your done.
Be wary of better. From a quality of life perspective I would absolutely put my 2.4 ahead of a Prusa. For example, I can mechanically level my bed via automation. That said, expectations often outstrip reality. Beware of what you’re getting into.
I think you got a lot of good replies, but at a glance no one said “Prusa good!” so here’s that reply. Prusa printers are workhorses. They run their own machines in a print farm printing parts for the printers they sell and iterate/bring tweaks into production.
If you look at posts from a year or more ago they’ll frequently appear as trustworthy/hassle free options. They’ve somewhat fallen out of favor from a price to performance ratio, but if you want a hassle free printer so you can just worry about printing they’re still a good option.
Jumping in here, a lot of what you said checks Voron boxes. Fast, CoreXY, can print a range of material, completely open source. I really like my 2.4. You can self source the whole BOM from wherever you want. There are a few BOM in a box options, including some put together by US companies (West 3D) but with whatever you buy a decent quantity of the BOM is going to originate overseas.
There’s a very large community around the printer, along with tons of mods. The only thing it doesn’t do out of the box is multi-material, but there are mods for that.
It goes beyond this to the things people print. There’s a lot of… low shelf life dudads turned out by a subset of our community. For example, a coworker printed each of the ten of us a 4" tall Groot as a holiday present pre-covid. I bet most of those wound up in the bin. I totally get the hobby of collecting trinkets, but often wonder about the end state - it will all eventually need a new home or will end up in a landfil.
Plastic recycling is a fine idea, but in many cases the material winds up getting shipped overseas and burned. It’s also the least preferred option of reduce, reuse, recycle. It is cool that some filament companies are now accepting scraps, but that’s not very common (yet?). I also wonder how they deal with contamination. Sorting the different plastic types is difficult today from my understanding. That and low resale value is why plastics recycling is struggling.
All that said, I am a massive believer in functional prints. You can breathe new life into existing things and the things you create can be here for a long time.
You got a few good replies, but I just want to briefly mention build volume. Nearly everything I print is functional. Splitting prints into sections isn’t the biggest deal, but being able to print things in one shot is nice. Consider the size of things you’ll be printing and ask if you think you’ll be happy.
I’ve never heard of PCTG before. A quick Google search and I’ll probably be ordering a spool.
I’ve had similar experiences. PLA is very stiff, which also makes it brittle. I have quite a few functional PETG that have been going strong for years. Now that I can print ASA too, some of my newer functional prints are transitioning materials.
When you smooth you do give up some dimensional accuracy.
These days, I more or less exclusively print ASA and PETG. I would call the ASA tougher than PETG, but PETG’s ability to stick to itself when printing makes me prefer it for thin parts. In my experience, PETG also allows for more elastic (temporary/recoverable) deformation before the part undergoes plastic (permanent) deformation.
ASA and ABS are warp prone and this is an 11" / ~275mm wide print that’s equally tall 🤷
The build volume of my printer means lots of surface area for the acrylic enclosure, which in turn makes it hard for me to exceed a 50°C chamber temp, despite 4x bed fans.
The next print, with normal supports, pulled the bed off the magnetic build plate. Insulation eliminated warping and let me pull off the print.
I do agree that a “nicer” enclosure is the preferred method. I have zero issues with PETG at this size. I’ve never tried PLA on this printer, but it should be fine too.
Huh, any particular ABS brand(s)? I am tempted to grab a roll. I’ve been running polymaker’s ASA and other than warpage on big parts with my lower chamber temps (yay big printer with lots of enclosure surface area) it prints fairly well.
I run the filter inside an enclosed printer with an exhaust fan.