The challenge of ABS printing
Let me be the first to say, ABS (or Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) is a horrible pain in the behind to print. It’s also a filament with one of the highest heat deflections short of industrial materials like PEEK. There are many applications for a material like ABS where strength, heat tolerance and rigidity are useful. Until recently I’ve had the same open spool of ABS filament for almost four years. It is notoriously difficult to print due to being very sensitive to ambient temperature and any draft at all. If the temp is too low or there is a draft the print will warp severely, most of the time making the part unusable. I’ve had no desire to struggle through printing it, until now.
To be fair, I’ve never really put in the effort to learn how to properly print ABS. It was mostly a lot of trial and error to print things like fan ducts for my machines that needed a good amount of heat tolerance. Larger scale printing in ABS always seemed like something unnecessary. All my machines were printed in PETG which does fine. Then I decided to build a Voron. The Voron 2.4 3D printer is a beast of a machine. Massively over-engineered and capable of incredibly high print speeds. The machine itself has a built in enclosure which is perfect for heat sensitive materials like ABS. It also requires that to take full advantage of the enclosure that the printed parts for the machine be printed in ABS.
I fixed up the old Ikea Lack enclosure for my Prusa MK3S+, used the home made heater from my resin printer and tried my luck. It took a while to get the temperature inside the chamber high enough since it’s sitting on a shelf in the corner of my basement office on two exterior walls but between the heater and the printer’s heated bed I was able to get it up to 35c. I then wasted an entire 1KG roll of ABS trying to get the settings right. (Then I wasted another roll printing the wrong parts for the Voron, more on that another day.) It took a while to get it right but the results were phenomenal. My MK3S+ has been printing Voron parts for almost two weeks straight.