ABS tests

I have been gifted a large reel of natural ABS and recently tried an experiment with the Darwin in attempting to print using it.
Although I got close to it working it was not close enough to warrant any more time spent until I have the new child Prusa up and running.

Here is a brief description of what I managed to establish.

1)     ABS needs a hotbed (which I have already purchased) I connected it directly to an ATX PSU as suggested on the eBay page I bought it from, and after some experimentation with different ATX PSU’s with different AMP ratings I managed to achieve the recommended 115 degrees C

2)     ABS needs a hotend temp of around 230 degrees C and after much fiddling around I came to the conclusion that the Parcan hotend with single heating resistor was just not going to cut it (not sure why as I am fairly sure that I have seen others using ABS successfully with this hotend) it may be more to do with my firmware control of the hotend as however hard I try I have yet to get the hotend to calibrate properly, i.e. my IR temperature sensor always says that the hotend is some considerably lower temperature that the thermistor reading in the software says the hotend is at.

        *Update*  - I can now confirm that there is no issue with the parcan hotend for printing ABS as it works fine on my new 1st Child Prusa derivative, the issue must have been with the depreciated Gen3 electronics set and or mid 2010 5D firmware.

But considering these issues I did manage to get a single print to stick (partially) to the hotbed and was impressed to see my first layer of ABS taking up the form of a printed “widebar” unfortunately due to this being a partial success I was forced to abort the print before the second layer peeled the first and began creating ABS freeform art!

I look forward to trying this again on the new printer as I am hoping that the temperature control issues may vanish with a new electronics set tied to the Parcan hotend.

I will also be removing the Hotbed from the Darwin, which was only added to test ABS and attempt to avoid the warping issues I was having with PLA, and fitting it to the new child printer.

The PLA warping I was getting seems to have been caused by the low ambient temperature in the room that I run the printer in as I have seen a marked improvement now summer is here and the room is warmer.

I will need to look at building a heated chamber in the future as I intend to move all my printing capability into the workshop I have which is not ever likely to be heated.