Premium “Definitely” ABS Tests

I received my new roll of Premium Black ABS the other day an got straight to it testing with a small belt clamp print test to see how it printed, The quality of this plastic is totally different to the reel I had that I thought was ABS (it is probably HDPE) and has its own set of peculiarity’s.

After printing several test pieces I decided to go for a very large print in order to test possible warping issues, after that test failed for different reasons this is what I learnt.

Warping is non-existent it appears that running this premium Black ABS at 220 degrees C and the hotbed at 110 degrees C eliminates warping completely, as I was attempting to print the Darius self-starting wind turbine which fills the build platform almost completely (can’t build larger than that without a custom build printer with an enlarged print bed).

The reason it failed was due to delamination of the ABS layers from one another, on further reading this may be due to my hot end not being hot enough and or possibly my layer height being too large.

Another issue is that as the hotbed on my Prusa heats up is warps the entire bed downwards, further reading on this issue turned up a simple fix of using the center hole as another fixing point and using a countersunk machine screw to fix the center of the hot bed in place this supposedly resolves the warping hot bed.

One of my ABS test prints was a new X carriage and although  the quality is not great (slightly warped on one corner, as I was running the hot bed at only 90 degrees C at the time, since turned up to 110)  it looks like it would be useable.

I need to strip it down and fit the hotbed fix and ABS X carriage, I have also noticed some considerable flex in the X idler end and I am not sure if this is causing some backlash issues or not but I will probably print a better X idler end soon as well.