ABS “Die Swell” from hell!

(Update : See note below ** for update on the confusion over what materials I was trying to print with)

 

The learning curve on this project just keeps on rising!

 

I have noticed during calibration that my large roll of natural ABS** seems to suffer from extreme Die Swell feeding a 3mm filament through my .5 mm parcan hotend results in an almost exactly 1mm extrusion filament!

 

So in essence I am getting extreme die swell, If I setup Pronterface & SFACT as I would have done for PLA I am printing with a 1mm filament which leaves a lot to be desired in terms of print quality (I was hoping for approximately 0.5mm) after investigating (on the web) how I might deal with this annoying trait of what appears to be just this particular batch of ABS I found that  “Die Swell” is much more common on ABS & HDPE that PLA (nonexistent on PLA) it was suggested that you may be able to stretch the filament whilst printing by increasing the speed (although after further reading  this only seemed to work on non 5D based firmware’s as if you increase the speed on a 5D based printer the software/firmware adjusts the flow rate accordingly) so after running several print tests I have come to the conclusion that the only way I can deal with such extreme Die Swell is to setup the Software as I would for PLA which results in a 1mm print extrusion (too large for any sort of decent prints) and then half the flow rate which gives me a nice .5mm print side filament, I will now need to adjust the “Carve” settings to bring the extrusion diameter down until the extruded filaments begin to fuse.

 

As I only managed to get my head around this last night I have yet to test this in anger but it is looking like a promising potential solution to this extreme Die Swell issue.

 

Other people have just dumped the offending ABS and bought some that does not suffer from this, I also read that neutral or white ABS seems to suffer worse than Black ABS so my next reel of ABS might end up being a dark colour to hopefully avoid this issue.

 

As I am not made of money I can’t really afford to dump 200 meters of filament so I am hoping my software “Fix” might allow me to at least use up this old ABS reel before investing in more (also it has been a very good lesson on the trials and tribulations of trying to use ABS instead of PLA).

 

** I have since discovered that this was HDPE not  ABS after all, hence all the problems I was having trying to print with it, I have also discovered that my entire roll of what I thought was PLA has now been chemically proven to be Polycaprolactone  AKA PCL or CAPA (trade name) http://www.biodeg.net/bioplastic.html.

 

I proved the CAPA by chucking an early failed print into a saucepan of water on the kitchen hob and heating as soon as the water started to boil the whole lump just turns to goo which you can reform in your hands and once cooled sets hard, this material is also known as friendly plastic or polymorph (tradenames) and added bonus as I should be able to heat and extrude back into 3mm filament for reprinting, I must get my plastic recycling extruder built.

 

So in essence every PLA/ABS reference previous to this post has incorrectly assumed that I was printing with PLA/ABS when in fact I was printing with PCL,CAPA and HDPE respectively, what a dummy! Oh well you live and learn.