ABS Warping is making me crazy.

In the past, I had minor issues with this, but it's gone to ridiculous.

The printer is enclosed. I have a heater pouring heat in, it's probably 55-60 deg C in the print chamber the print bed is 105 deg C, extruding at 230 deg C. Bed adhesive for this print was hairspray. I've also used ABS juice, same thing.

ABS is warping like crazy. This is an attempt to make a DVD drive face


The corners are pulled up, and the warp extends well into the area that I really kind of need to remain flat. (If it pulled the mounting ear up a little, I'd be a little less upset by that.)

I used to be able to get flat prints, without the heated chamber, though those prints really sucked for other reasons.

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MBot3D Printer
MakerBot clone Kit from Amazon
Added heated bed.

Leadscrew self-built printer (in progress)
Duet Wifi, Precision Piezo parts

Do you print a wide brim?
If the design is yours or you have the .scad files at hand, you could cut the vertical walls in several pieces. It is the track length that lifts the corners.

Hmmm. Thanks for the suggestions, I'll see what I can do.

There's not a lot of room for brim, at least not on the sides. The model is 240mm wide, my printer can in theory deal with 250mm. I can't make it smaller, as it's supposed to hold a computer blu-ray drive.

I managed a test print in PLA, though of course that's an entirely different animal.

Yes, it's my design, I originally had a thicker plate, but make that thinner, with thin walls to attempt to keep some rigidity. With the large plate on the bottom thinner, the problem isn't as bad, but it's now down to 1mm, which is actually a bit too thin for the part.

I still need the rigidity for the finished product. I suppose that I could leave gaps that I could fill in afterwards with scrap filament and a soldering iron. I was going to abandon printing this ins ABS, but I've been having other issues with PETG. I suppose that this could probably survive being made from PLA. I could strengthen it with a couple of coats of enamel.

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MBot3D Printer
MakerBot clone Kit from Amazon
Added heated bed.

Leadscrew self-built printer (in progress)
Duet Wifi, Precision Piezo parts

You should try Polymaker Polymax. Better than ABS, unless you need temperature resistance.
Strength and flexibility at least as good or even better than ABS.
And best of all, Pla is so easy to print.
All my machine parts are printed with Polymax now, gone are the trouble days of Abs ;-)

Sounds great, or would if I wouldn't need to get it shipped over the border. (I did find a Canadian supplier, but it's nearly $70/kg, almost triple the cost of PLA or ABS.)

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SupraGuy
Sounds great, or would if I wouldn't need to get it shipped over the border. (I did find a Canadian supplier, but it's nearly $70/kg, almost triple the cost of PLA or ABS.)

Well, sometimes paying a little more can give you great reward ;-)
Here, in Europe, the price is about the same as other quality filament. Which is also about 70us$ for a kg.

If you cant add a full brim add in 1 layer high circles along the edges where you can, just for more surface area, and more first layer grip.

You do have to trim these off later

What is your build platform? glass? PEI? bluetape?

Tried it again last night.

Thanks, Dust. I had considered adding mouse ears, but I did get good adhesion last night without. The build platform is glass, because I wanted to have that super-smooth surface finish that ABS juice on glass gives the final print.

I cleaned the glass off and applied a fresh batch of ABS juice. I did several layers, until there was a significant layer of clear ABS deposited on the glass. (Slightly cloudy looking.) I edited the model, removed the walls on the long edges, and put in some relief slits in the vertical supports. It was better... Until it wasn't. This is a fairly large model. I think that I'm going to have to re-do it in multiple pieces.

The model held to the glass really well. It actually pulled the corners of the glass off of the heated platform.the total warping on the surface was an acceptable level, though not perfect. A little after the point where I aborted the print above, it broke the kapton tape holding the glass down to the bed, and the glass moved under the print head, resulting in a mess. There were also some cracks forming in the model as it was building.

I'm going to re-do the model, so that I can print it in multiple pieces, and then assemble them, instead of printing it all in one piece. If I put together pieces of ABS using solvent welding, it will be stronger in the long run anyway. Less reliance on layer adhesion is a good thing. It will be more of a pain to assemble int he first place, but at this rate, it may take less time to print.

I can generally get the base layer to print. I have now got several copies of the base of this, which I got printed before things get bad.

I think that if I could print hotter and faster, it would probably be better, but it seems that it ABS warps, and there's not much to be done about that. I guess when it's more than 0.5% shrinkage from extrusion to cooled, it can't really be helped.

I am starting to wonder if PETG might be a better overall solution, if/when I get my issues with printing that stuff sorted out.

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MBot3D Printer
MakerBot clone Kit from Amazon
Added heated bed.

Leadscrew self-built printer (in progress)
Duet Wifi, Precision Piezo parts

I often use PETG on glass surface + 3D-Lac. No warping. Some brands do have more stringing than others.
My pal prints ABS(for four years now) and has warping on all his parts, but he don't mind.
To me warping is absolutely unacceptable, so no ABS for me.

I would like to suggest you try much lower heatbed temperature. I had similar issues like the one you described. Now I am using bed temp between 75- 85 deg Centigrade and nozel 220. Also note that it is adviceableto turn off the part cooling fan or use very low value. This will allowslower cooling of the new layer and thus prevent warping. The faster the cooling makes the layer contract and shrink, hence bending upward. Using very high bed temp. does not help especially if the new layer cools too fast. There must be a balance, so I suggest using my setup as a starting point.Hope this helps.

I have found that, even if you find the right conditions (printer settings, print bed surface material and adhesive characteristics) to hold large parts flat to the bed during printing, they will take on some warp when removed from the printing surface. The stresses which cause warping are introduced as each layer is applied and then cools and they exist even if the part is held perfectly flat during printing. The stresses build up as more layers are applied. I am wondering if there is some way to anneal these parts to relieve these stresses. Such as heating the parts in an oven (to what temp?) and letting them cool slowly. Has anyone ever tried this?

Never worked with ABS, read tons of messages about that ABS warping problem.
A solution for that problem could be printing a brim 2 or even more layers + a skirt the same height as the part itself. Meaning you would make your own little enclosure around the object while printing. So doing the part will stay warm(er) as it should. Worth to try...??

@Chriske: PETG isn't a solution at this point, I'm having other issues there that just don't seem to be surmountable with the printer that I'm using. I will hopefully be doing something about it at a later date though. Some parts, I don't mind a little warping, so long as function remains. Other parts need to look nice (Like this one) so warping is unacceptable, at least in the visible areas. (If, say the mounting tab were to lift, that would probably be okay, so long as the visible portion stayed flat.

@Humaxakin: Lower bed temps aren't good, the problem gets much worse, and on smaller prints. I already have the print fan off for everything except bridging, and even then, it's minimal. I can't really put much brim on these prints, since they're 240mm wide, and my print bed will only just fit them. I nominally have 250mm of X axis movement, but realistically, I have about 242mm maximum.

@stan510: Actually, this is part of the purpose of a heated chamber, and there are some ways to take care of this, which I found, while looking things up. Mostly though if it can be held flat until it cools below the glass temperature of the plastic, it will stay flat.

For what it's worth, I got my part completed successfully. I gave up on doing it as a monolithic print, and did it in several pieces. The main faceplate was made to be quite thin, with only a few parts sticking up (Mounting tabs, and some "bosses" for attaching the other pieces.) Then there were some rails for around the edges, and some plates for attaching parts. These were then solvent-welded together to form the needed part. Printing the plates flat makes them stronger than the layer adhesion would be for thin parts, by several orders of magnitude, and once solvent welded to the plate, the whole structure is very strong. The plates welded to the edges make the face reasonably rigid. Of course the downside is that my printed part is "some assembly required." Also, it means that |I could not simply re-print the part in a different filament, like PETG, and expect to use acetone to weld it together, like I can with ABS.


This is the front piece to a PC case that I'm making to fit in a bookshelf as a part of a home theatre system. The DVD drive that I'm using for test fitting is broken, so the tray does not retract anymore.


This is a side view. The red face panel will be ont he outside of a 1/4" piece of wood, and the white panel goes on the inside, with the screws holding it in place. The parts holding the DVD drive in place were printed in clear ABS, which is solvent welded to the white face. you can also see the side rails of the face, which are welded to the flat surface.

The face of the red bezel is 3.33mm thick. I had to re-print that 3 times. The first time, my printer said that it hit thermal runaway, so I restarted it. It got to exactly the same place, then had the same error. At that point, I figured that something got correupted in the gcode file, so I changed the slic3r settings a bit and generated a new file, which resulted in the print pictured. One corner of the print lifted a tiny amount, so I'll probably re-do it.

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MBot3D Printer
MakerBot clone Kit from Amazon
Added heated bed.

Leadscrew self-built printer (in progress)
Duet Wifi, Precision Piezo parts

Getting your firmware dialed in is well worth the trouble.

The printer I have working atm is a complete POS... I got it a new controller board and changed it up in a few ways, dialed in Marlin on an MKS Gen 1.4 and now I have a printer I can work with.
PETG ABS both work although I can only do ABS in the summer too wet and cool on Vancouver Isl this time of year.

PETG no problem...

I think I might sell off my spools of ABS and never look back actually....

Yeah, it's just an unnecessary amount of trouble. Or it should be unnecessary.

The printer came with an MKS Gen L v1.0 board, with the Marlin firmware already loaded, which means that I don't have the Configuration.h file for what's loaded in there already, so I can't just make small tweaks, I have to start over. It appears that the version of Marlin that it's running is 1.1.0 RC8, so it's not even a release firmware (Which may explain why it often hangs at "Heating..." until I bump the nozzle temperature down and then back up again.

For the most part, I like the loaded firmware, and I'm not looking forward to dialing all of that in from scratch. It will probably end up waiting until my old/new printer is up and running.

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chriske
A solution for that problem could be printing a brim 2 or even more layers + a skirt the same height as the part itself. Meaning you would make your own little enclosure around the object while printing. So doing the part will stay warm(er) as it should. Worth to try...??

A skirt the same height than the printed part..and then fill the gap with "Vermiculite". A fire resistant, soft and insulating material that keeps the part nice and toasty.
It might even help printing very tall parts and keep them from getting kicked off the bed?