Print Quality issues (pictures)

[curious aardvark]

measure the diameter of the filament extruded by the printer when loading filament.
Then put this as The extrusion width in the extruder settings in s3d.

I've never bothered measuring any filament diameter, yeah all the books tell you to, but to be honest modern filament manufacturing has got to the point that even the real cheap filament is as close to 1.75 as you'd want - and it's never effected any prints. But the width the extruder extrudes DOES matter.
My 0.4 nozzle etrudes at 0.4 but my 0.5 nozzle extrudes at 0.55.
By default s3d sets the extrusion width a 10th of a mill higher than the nozzle width. But if you measure and put the correct figures in you'll get cleaner and more accurate prints.

And always remember that abs shrinks aftter cooling - so you'll never get as clean a print surface as you will from pla.

And yeah pretty much 2 layers/shells would be my minimum.

One of the things I find interesting is that a lot of people want things to look like they were injection moulded. Or they want to print at the highest resolution because it looks better.
There is very little difference between 0.3mm and 0.1mm layer prints. Except one prints 3x faster.

You will not get perfectly smooth prints from a fff machine - it's simply not how it works.
So it makes sense to print faster and either - if using abs, poison yourself with acetone smoothing the print. Or if using pla, paint or sand the lines away - doesn't take long.

Or just accept the 'penalty' for having such a remarkable machine in your home is the fact that you can point the lines out to people - most won't notice unless you do - and explain how the machine works :-)