Comment on I want to branch out from PLA. Should I try ABS or TPU?
j4k3@lemmy.world 4 weeks agoI’ve only gone through 2 rolls of the cheap Matterhackers house brand ABS and maybe a quarter roll of Prusa ASA. My primary curiosity was if ABS/ASA is an effective alternative to Prusament PC Blend. In my experiments, my primary use for ABS/ASA is for refinishing and polishing. I’m super familiar with ABS in pro auto body work I was doing before RepRap was even a thing. I actually specialized in plastics and small repairs in addition to airbrush and graphics work as a painter; liked the art, but work out of used car lots paid the bills.
I only made a little disk sander thing out of a box fan motor with a housing constrained by print bed dimensions, also some dremel drill press tooling, and some BB30 bicycle parts.
The disk sander thing was not very useful overall. The level of integrated design was extreme and impractical in most cases, but it proved to me that I could technically do it. That largely helped me avoid the desire to build a Voron. Plus I spent years huffing ABS fumes already. The bicycle stuff showed me that PC blend is still quite a bit better at holding a load in the real world. I designed a couple of parts with threads that hold the bearings in tension on the spindle of the bike crank. I’m certainly not in race shape any more, but I am still quite hard on bike stuff. Plus bikes are a great test bed as leg forces are unbalanced, the vibration is inconsistent, contaminants are random, and UV exposure is harsh.
Anyways, the prusament ASA doesn’t have as many issues as MH ABS, but the difference is not huge. If I was going to do automotive class finishing, that is the only time I would go out of my way to use ABS/ASA. I could make it perfect on another level entirely than anything else I have played with.
IMALlama@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I’ve dabbled in both automotive work and home renovation. Anyone who can do auto body work or interior finishing work well deserves way more credit than they usually get, so big kudos. I am pretty solid at the mechanical bits, but when it comes to finishing/painting things are a lot more difficult for me.
Print finishing is something I’ve thought about a few times now, but most of my prints are functional and live a pretty hard life. A bit of texture from layer lines and other imperfections is the least of their concerns. That said, I have sanded ASA some and it sands amazingly well. I could see getting it pretty smooth without too much effort and then either using a solvent based or finishing based method. Of course, if your print has a lot of fine detail this is going to be a massive PITA.
You can totally build a Voron anyway! I suggest magnetic panels, which makes popping the top super easy if you want to print PLA. I’ve run PLA, PETG, TPU, and ASA through mine. I have an under bed carbon filter that does a pretty good job with fumes.
Agree on bike parts being a good print test bed. I’m impressed that anything held up with pedal loads, there’s a lot of force there.
My main motive for sticking with ASA is its easily attainable high volumetric flow. I can easily swing 30 mm^3/s on my Rapido without having to jack up temps. Between this, Core-XY motion, and input shaping prints are way faster than my old i3 clone. PETG is quite a bit slower. PLA can be fast, but it’s also somewhat brittle.