MakerGear Forum

Anyone try eSUN ABS+ filament? If so, please share your experiences. For example, how does it compare to regular ABS?

Ron

Yes, I have.

It's better. It's kinda "creamy", almost, and just seems predictable. I'm having good success so far with straight white ABS, which is notoriously bad from eSUN otherwise (the regular ABS and PLA are terrible in white).

I have a spool of Black. Been running fine, but I'm running it a lot hotter than standard ABS.
Been doing bending tests on to check layer bonding and at 270 this stuff still pops straight across a layer boundary. Running some parts at 275 - they'll finish up late today.

A few weeks back I ran some sturdy parts on the PEI bed. Got some delamination when the print temp was 255. Upped it to 265 and the parts printed without issue. Parts printed flat with no lifting in the corners. I think the bed temp was 85C.

The build I was running finished right when I got home from work today, and the results are disappointing. Even with an extruder temperature of 275C I got lousy layer bonding. The extrusion looks great - totally filled between perimeter layers and nice solid fill on top and bottom. In bending, however, the test rod snapped pretty easily. My 'standard' test rods have been 3 perimeter outlines with 40% honeycomb infill. I did this build with 6 outlines hoping to beef it up a bit, but the test rod snapped at the same point, and perfectly clean across the layer boundary. The parts I made didn't have nearly enough strength for their intended purpose.

so while it makes a fairly nice looking part, if you need structural integrity, I'd look elsewhere.

.35mm nozzle
.1667 layer thickness (6 layers per mm)
275C extruder temp
Kapton on Glass build surface at 110C
4200mm/min max pring speed
25% underspeed for solid outlines
80% solid infill underspeed.

Still new to this game, so if I'm doing something stupid that's costing me part strength, please enlighten me.

zemlin wrote:.1667 layer thickness (6 layers per mm)

The Z axis machinery runs at 400 step/mm, so the smallest motion increment is 0.0025 mm. A layer thickness of 0.1667 mm works out to 66.68 steps, which means that the actual layer thickness will be either 66 or 67 steps: 0.1650 or 0.1675 mm.

Check the Z-axis values in the G-Code file to find out what's actually going on. Most likely, you'll find groups of 66 step layers with one 67 step layer when the error between the actual and the ideal Z-axis coordinates got large enough. That certainly depends on the slicing algorithm and how they deal with numeric accuracy.

Given the imprecision of motor microsteps and the overall Z-axis stiction, that degree of fussiness probably doesn't make any perceptible difference, but when you want absolute uniformity, always pick a layer thickness that's both an integer multiple of the Z-axis step size and an even fraction of your model dimensions.

For a hard-metric solid model with Z-axis sizes ending in *.00 and *.25 (and so on), you really want a layer thickness that multiplies out to "nice" numbers, because the layer thickness sets the precision of the Z-axis dimensions. Using 6 layers/mm (0.165 mm layers) gives you *.00, *.17, *.33, *.50, and so on, of which only *.00 and *.50 are nice.

A (rather coarse) 0.25 mm thickness gives you *.00, *.25, *.50, and *.75, all of which look like convenient numbers. For most of my models, that works fine; I don't care much about the striations along the side.

Although 0.15 mm seems useful, the closest you can get to (say) 10.00 mm is 9.90 mm or 10.05 mm. Whether that matters depends on how tight your mechanical tolerances must be; most likely ±0.15 mm won't matter, but remember those built-in errors when you wield the calipers.

Below 0.15 mm, the difficulties of producing thin layers rear their ugly heads.

And, of course, if you're using hard-inch models, none of that matters... [grin]

Thanks - had wondered about the ratio of steps on the Z axis. Will take that into consideration.
Might try one more ABS+ build with the .5mm nozzle and heaver layers to see how that impacts the part strength.

I have tested eSun black ABS+, at 240 degrees, Zebra plate at 100 degrees, it works fine with no visible warping. Haven't done any bending test though.

I'm liking Hatchbox ABS better. Printing on PEI the ABS+ sticks enough that I'm damaging parts trying to remove them. Had it down to 60C. I s'pose I could run cooler, but been getting good prints on 90C PEI with Hatchbox ABS. Just ordered a few more colors do see if I can make good use of ABS. I was about to give up on it a while back.

Another thing about the ABS+ - I tried making a slurry with it, and whatever they blend with the ABS doesn't dissolve in acetone. Even after a couple weeks in the bottle, the mix still had a lot of solids in it - not at all like juice made with standard ABS.

That's right, ABS+ won't fully dissolve in Acetone, but it glues fine.

zemlin wrote:Another thing about the ABS+ - I tried making a slurry with it, and whatever they blend with the ABS doesn't dissolve in acetone. Even after a couple weeks in the bottle, the mix still had a lot of solids in it - not at all like juice made with standard ABS.