ABS surface finish results?

[MWaldorf]

Update - been a fun week of trial and error. Last weekend I made some unintended art:
goop.jpg

So much for leaving a print unattended overnight! Cleaning up this mess required dismantling the extruder assembly, soaking the hot ends in acetone and reconnecting the right side thermocouple. I took the opportunity to level the hot ends, using a combination of Geoff's set screw technique and fine tuning with aluminum foil shims. Not perfect but much better than it was.

With that accomplished I took a big step and started using HIPS for raft and support. Confirmed the dual extruders work with the traffic cone model and ran another model:
PupUp.jpg

Better than before, but still with the uneven finish across the top. Finally I flipped the models over in S3d and that made all difference:
PupDown2.jpg

Oddly, the prints are coming out a little bit small (~1%) but only in the X direction, not Y or Z. I would have thought that ABS shrinkage would at least happen in by X and Y.

Also, I got huge quality improvements by slowing down the print speed. S3d had the default print speed at 3600 mm/min. I slowed it down to 1200 mm/min. Obviously much longer to print, but no point printing lousy parts quickly.

Anyway, big steps and I wanted to share for anyone else who might find it useful.