Is ASA much easier to print than people think ?

[DBMandrake]

Thanks for the reply! I don't have an enclosure but do have an all metal hot end direct direct extruder which can go up to 300C, (although 250C seems to work well, haven't tried 255 or 260 which is sometimes suggested, mainly because the spool suggests a maximum of 250C and I'm already getting great results at 250C) and the bed is limited to a maximum of 100C. The bed has a lot of thermal mass (it's a 300x300x340 bed slinger) so it takes over half an hour to cool from 100C to 30C or so if I leave the PEI sheet on the bed, if I remove the sheet it cools down in under 5 minutes. Since as you say slower cooling should be beneficial for ASA to avoid warping if I'm doing any kind of serious print I would be inclined to just leave the sheet on the bed for the half hour it takes to gradually cool down. 80mm/s is the fastest I've been able to print ASA without artefacts, whereas I can print most things in PLA at 150mm/s but often print those at 80mm/sec anyway if there are any delicate features.

I'm sure I would get a bit better finish if I dropped the speed a bit and may end up doing that for prints where finish quality is important. I've had a quick go at Prusa slicer recently but after 9 months of using Cura I've found it hard to get to grips with and I know Cura inside out now and get good results from it especially since they added the Arachne engine and enhanced tree supports. PLA is still my default material especially for printing toys and most of my rolls of filament are PLA but I'll definitely be getting some more ASA for functional prints especially outdoor stuff, as I only have black at the moment as the one thing I initially wanted to print needs to be black.

I guess the point of my post was to dispel the myth that ASA is just a no go if you don't have an enclosure - I'm sure it's better to use an enclosure and easier to get good results, but it's not absolutely necessary if you use a few tricks and take some care. The biggest thing seems to be to have a bed that can go up to 100C and an extruder that can do 250C. I avoided ASA myself for a long time due to so many videos and articles showing issues with cracking and warping, (although often they were talking about ABS and then saying the same applied to ASA) and finally thought what the heck, I'll buy one roll to experiment with as I actually need a couple of things printed that really ought to be in ASA, (clips for use in a car's engine bay) and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it prints and within my first few test prints I was already getting better results than I have ever got with PETG both in terms of stringing, and layer strength. Because ABS and ASA are similar materials mechanically I think many articles conflate the two and assume characteristics of ABS apply to ASA as well but there are a couple of articles I've read which say ASA is much less prone to shrinking and cracking than ABS such as this: https://blog.prusa3d.com/asa-prusame...-to-abs_30636/ I have not tried to print ABS on the same open print bed (or at all) so I don't have a direct comparison myself, and I have no inclination to attempt to do so as on paper ASA seems to be equal or superior to ABS in practically every regard making ABS redundant.

Regarding PLA failures - I've seen a lot of variation between brands and types. I use 3DJake for almost all my filaments including PLA and ASA and they have been uniformly good. I also have a couple of silk PLA filaments of other brands and the silk filaments in particular suffer from stringing and produce extremely weak prints with very weak layer adhesion, to the degree that I would not print anything mechanical in silk PLA even for low temperature use - they're strictly decorative. By the way, does anyone know why my first post turned into a gigantic wall of text and lost all my paragraph breaks ? I'll go back and see if I can edit it because it's very hard to read like that. This is the only forum I've ever had this happen on. The paragraph breaks were all there in the edit box...