Ideal Ambient Enclosure Temp

Good Morning/Evening All,

Was curious if anyone has figured out an ideal ambient tempututre for an enclosure when printing ABS? I know for PLA you want it as cool as possible, so leaving the enclosure door open would probably be smart as well as ensuring the cooling fan is on. However for ABS, I am still getting slight cracks and what not, I would like to install a tempurture controller in my enclosure to turn on and off a heat pad to help keep the enclosue a constant ideal temp.

We have a couple stratasys machines (FDM1600 and FDM2000) at the makerspace that run at 70C inside the build chamber (and they run the extruder at 270C for ABS). They have a flexible hose on the hot-end to bring cool room air in/out without affecting the enclosure temperature.

I have found that 45C seems to work well. Even at 45C, you'd better keep the electronics outside the enclosure- heat and electronics are a bad mix. Also, note that if your motors run hot, they're liable to have problems in the enclosure at 45C. You may need to reduce currents (and maybe slow down) to prevent overheating. If you have a corexy machine you can easily put all the axis motors outside the build chamber (longer belts and Z axis screws) and run it as hot as you want, at least until the extruder motor overheats. A geared extruder that runs cool helps here.

In the picture the smaller object was printed without an enclosure, the larger object in an enclosure at 45C. Otherwise they are identical. I had a little corner lift on the big one because it was printed without a brim or raft.