Rafting :-)

[curious aardvark]

really ?
weird. I've done two with no issues whatsoever.
You printing them at .1 or .2 ?
So far I've used .2 for detailed stuff and I think with the box the slightly thicker filament does the bridging better and lays down cleaner lines.
I can't currently see any reason for going as small as .1
The box above was: white abs, .2mm, 60mms print, 100 travel, 120 bed, 230 head, raft on, 2 perimeters, zero infill, left head (cos righty is scheduled for dismantling and cog cleaning at some point in the near future).
I believe it's the white abs that came with the printer.

Everything I printed yesterday went flawlessly - the glass plate holder I printed at .3

The second glass plate holder (actually mk3 as mk 1 had no side stabilisers) had 2mm walls rather than 1mm - and is much much better.

The curling is definitely heat related. As I printed the second one with the long axis front to back as opposed to side to side and there was barely any curl at all.

Also I'm using blue tape with bed at 120.
I'll get my ir thermo on it at some point - but there's definitely a hot spot in line with the power plug that drops off as you move to the sides.

Printed a teeny little bunny just now to demo the printer to a friend - again, perfect - knocked it out in 20 minutes about 2cm tall but again, zero issues.

Also printed the enclosed spinny gear thing yesterday. Now that takes some close tolearances. Spins like a dream.

I pretty much only have the one issue and that's sticking to the plate without a raft.

For the time being rafts and blue tape work well and I'll stick to them (almost a pun) .
Plus the tape is untouched, actually seesm tougher than the kapton. And an absolute doddle to apply.

But the machine itself is just fantastic.
zero stringing, even at 80mms which I printed the first bunny at. There was a fair bit of rattling so I think I'll default to 60 for most things as that's fairly quick but also the machine sounds much happier :-)

I've got a 0.5mm brass nozzle coming, figure for fast crude builds at .4 mm it might help. Dunno, it was a couple of quid and I thought I'd give it a go :-) Plus it might help with the ninja flex by reducing the back pressure, rather than a complete extruder rebuild. We'll see.

But yeah - yesterday a major step forward. I'm now totally confident I can stick a model on for print and it'll work without any issues.

Space shuttle printing at the moment and I'll throw an ls elephant at it later.

The makerware software is still annoying, I'm increasingly aware of how good the slicing is though, just wished I had control over the firt layer without a raft.
Oh well, nothings perfect. And for the time being while I'm still very much in the learning stages - it's doing a decent job.

Nylon (going to be problematic for more than one reason - comes on a spool with a hole too small to fit on the spool holder - what are they thinking ?) , pla, laywood and even ninjaflex still to play with :-)

Not too mention the dual head stuff - I'm really looking forward to all the things that'll let me do.