ABS curling on the ends (10" i3v)

I'm sure this is a dead horse, but after making some decent prints in PLA, ABS seems to be dreadful. I have yet to make one stick. Specifically on the corners (I know, I said ends. I meant corners). I am using 110 for the bed temp, and 230 for the nozzle, although I've tried as high as 250 nozzle, since that's what came on the download from MakerFarm. Tried spraying the glass with hairspray, which did next-to-nothing, and also tried blue painter's tape, which made it stick for like 10 layers or so, before it gave up.

Any tips on making ABS stick? I'll try to find acetone to make some ABS juice. In the meantime, I had some things I wanted to print in ABS instead of PLA. :(

I'd also love to see configs for Slic3r and/or Cura (haven't had success at all in the latter). I'm running a .04 Hexagon. Stock fan shroud.

Thanks again, guys.

I have had pretty good luck so far.
I have a glass bed, 90C, hairspray, and use a Brim of 7, which I think helps alot.

This problem never goes away. It will always be with you. But there are things you can do to mitigate it.

I was making a Pump Jack for my brother. He just graduated as a Petroleum Engineer from the University of Texas. I had problems with the beams of the main Pump Jack curling up. I punched holes in the beam and that helped a lot. But I finally beat the problem when I cut little stress relief slots into the bottom part of the beams. If you rotate the Pump Jack and look at the bottom of it, what I just said will make sense.

Attachment 2926

ABS can be problematic on on open printer. PLA sticks great to painter's tape. not so much with ABS. You can print onto glass with an elmers glue stick or onto Kapton Tape with an ABS Slurry. Some people put anchors on the corners to help adhesion? Your temps seem in the ball park.

A brim will help a lot. I also have tossed my hairspray in favour of the Elmer's Glue stick method. I haven't had an ABS part warp on me yet since I've started using it.

I have found that bumping the bed up to 115 makes a huge difference. I went from everything popping off the bed on its own to having to use a pair of pliers to break it loose.

Wow, thanks, all! Big response. It looks like I have some experimenting to do. Luckily, I have 2 rolls of ABS to play with. I have PLA making some new Z-endstops, so I can get it a bit more accurate. Also need to get my bed leveling skills up to par, I guess. :)

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Originally Posted by AbuMaia

A brim will help a lot. I also have tossed my hairspray in favour of the Elmer's Glue stick method. I haven't had an ABS part warp on me yet since I've started using it.

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Hmmmm.... It might be time for me to try the Glue Stick!

I use the Elmer's Disappearing Purple Washable School Glue Stick. 2 sticks for about $2, if I remember correctly.

I have been using hair spray straight on the glass prints have been sticking well.

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Originally Posted by theAut0

...I'd also love to see configs for Slic3r and/or Cura (haven't had success at all in the latter). I'm running a .04 Hexagon. Stock fan shroud.

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A set of Cura settings is available in the i3v Cura Settings thread

Thanks, printbus. I saw those, but since they were for 1.75 filament, I'm not confident with it. Not sure what all I would need to modify, aside from the filament diameter, itself.

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Originally Posted by AbuMaia

A brim will help a lot. I also have tossed my hairspray in favour of the Elmer's Glue stick method. I haven't had an ABS part warp on me yet since I've started using it.

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A tip of the hat to AbuMaia, because I also agree! Using a brim 3-5 mm has helped my nail down my hardest to stick prints.

I'll have to go get one of these elmers glue sticks. Hope I didn't lose my glue stick skills from 2nd grade! ;)

Just to add my 2 cents, I was also having a lot of trouble with my ABS prints curling on my 10" i3v, but I have found a complete solution (for me). I changed the cooling shroud for my hexagon hot end to clough42's design (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:335613). Not only does this cooling shroud not melt onto the hot end itself like the original design, but it blows the air up and away from the bed. I think that the original design actually blows on the back of the print, causing it to contract.

When printing the large extruder gear, the part of the print at the back of the printer would curl every time. When I switched to the new cooling shroud, the curling stopped completely. If you look at the attached picture, the only difference between the prints was the cooling shroud. The print bed surface, slicing, print settings, and ambient temperature were 100% identical from one print to the other. Notice the curling to the left (which was pointed to the back of the printer). The print on the left was stopped about 2/3 of the way through the print when I noticed all of the curling.
Attachment 3016

If you are still having issues with print curling, it is absolutely worth it to try printing this new shroud and buying the couple dollar fan. I can print in ABS now without a brim or raft or anything else. I've tested this with a bunch of designs and have not had a single ABS design curl since switching cooling shrouds.

Ooh. I'll have to print it out. Been on the fence about it for a while. I've printed a couple of upgrades, including a new Z-stop design I found/liked. Nothing against some of the other designs I've seen. http://www.thingiverse.com/make:96992
Some things I've learned, for my own future reference, and maybe some tips for future total newbs:

Z-stop adjustment and bed leveling is important. A lot more than you think. <Read that 4x before printing anything in ABS.
ABS Juice doesn't get enough credit, online (I haven't tried the glue sticks yet).
When people put hairspray, tape, or whatever else on the bed, pay attention to what material they're using. I used tape for ABS, didn't get what all the fuss was about. Didn't stick at all. Used the same tape for PLA, and I now have parts with blue tape stuck to them, that will never come off, for their entire lives. And no, that's not the sticky side of the tape. It's just some kind of molecular sorcery with the shiny, non-sticky side of blue tape when it touches hot PLA.
That 115° bed temp is really where it's at. So, for those of us with 10" beds, that means it's gonna be a while warming up.
The problem really does change every time you print. Soon as you think you've nailed it, it will be back, tomorrow.
Slic3r can do a better job than Cura, sometimes. But Cura has a nice UI, and if you can get by with it, it's cool. I've successfully printed from both.

I can also vouch for that end-stop design. I printed that out on day two (unfortunately with some shrinkage in the back since I didn't have the new shroud yet). I'll have to print it again, but it works so much better than the stock design. The micro-adjust is really easy and stays spot on for a long time.

The ABS juice is great too. If you just buy the standard acetone at Home Depot and put it into a mason jar with your abs cut offs or dud parts and wipe that on once every 10 prints or so, it works incredibly well. It also has the really nice effect of making the bottom of your print perfectly smooth.

As someone who has printed in ABS forever, and has never had many problems with it... I see alot of you using extra fans.. This for me was very bad. If I am printing ABS and do not want warpage, drafts and any sort of air blowing on the print is pretty much where it all falls down. The only fan I have that is running printing ABS is the extruder fan, and it is well and truly aobe the nozzle, and also my machine is open.

I am an anti-heat chamber person. For me, if I seal my machine the air blowing off the fan is enough to bounce off the enclosure, go back in the face of the print and make the ABS shrink prematurely.

It is possible to run some hot ends without a cooling fan (j-head and some others), but the hexagon and other all metal hot ends require a cooling fan above the heated tip, but below the extruder coupling.

The only fan that was on in my case (and it seems theAut0 as well) was the fan which is absolutely mandatory for the hexagon hot end. Without this fan the filament will soften and melt before it reaches the tip, causing jams and full blockages. The fan should blow on the heatsinks which separate the hot end from the extruder block, but on the stock design from Makerfarm the airflow seems to be poorly controlled, allowing some spillage airflow to reach your print. The design from clough42 seems to alleviate this.

I wish someone could remix clough42's design to work with an E3D v6. :(

From my own experiments, I'm starting to lean to a blower type fan, e.g. printbus, for better airflow.

I'm using a blower approach for the print cooler. Here we're talking about the hot end fan, so that doesn't matter. The print cooler is turned off for ABS.

On the hot end, I'm still using the hexagon hot end shroud design, but with a few tweaks. First, I flipped the fan around so it exhausts out the front of the printer. This seems to have helped reduce the focusing of the airflow on the build plate for ABS. I have noticed, however, that the fan then tends to have a downward angle to the airflow, perhaps because of the way the inside upper part of the fan is blocked by the hot end mount. To keep this downward airflow from cooling the forward side of the bed, I've added a strip of painters tape to the bottom of the fan for some larger prints, shaped to form a bit of a scoop. Yeah I could probably print something to do that, but the tape seems to be working fine.

One of the bad things about the hex shroud design is that it uses a fairly high flow fan to move air through a large volume, hoping that enough of it will pass over the fins of the hex heatsink. Clough42's design is better in that it is a closer fit, ensuring air will flow over the heatsink even though it is using a smaller fan. Having seen how easy it is to soften the mounting surface of the extruder base, I'm not thrilled at the idea of using a printed X-carriage plate to use the clough42 cooling system.

There are a few other shrouds on Thingiverse for the hexagon hot end, but the one's I found won't work with the i3/i3v carriage. It doesn't help that the fins on the hexagon hot end are tightly spaced, making it hard to use a slip-on shroud. For now, I'm sticking with the hex shroud, although I have also added plates to the back side to help ensure airflow is passing over the heatsink, not just flowing around it with little cooling effect.

If I had an e3d hot end, I'd likely use their tight-fitting shroud but with the fan flipped around so it exhausts to the front. The design of the X-carriage will still create some airflow as the fan pulls air up to it, but that should be less focused than with the fan mounted the other way. Besides, it's a smaller fan and thus likely less airflow.

EDIT: I still prefer to print with PLA instead of ABS when ever I can.

Yes, I have the fan on my E3D shroud flipped so it pulls air through the heatsink and shroud and out the fan. In preparation for adding a print cooler, though, I have the E3D fan turned 90 degrees, so it exhausts under the extruder motor, not out the front. There's *just* enough room in the X carriage for it to fit in this orientation.

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Originally Posted by AbuMaia

...I have the E3D fan turned 90 degrees, so it exhausts under the extruder motor, not out the front. There's *just* enough room in the X carriage for it to fit in this orientation.

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Even better!