Ultimaker 2 and PLA versus ABS

I guess I do have a complaint about my Ultimaker 2.  I love them to death right up until I decide to print ABS again.  It took me a while to even get good print adhesion but I have that working but now it is all about details.  The following images illustrate my frustration.

ABS

 Note the details on the top of the engine compartment.   Not to mention the separation of the outlines from the infill.  Should be able to tune that out though have tried twice already!

PLA

Same details are sharp on PLA.  There is a minor issue on the top of the fuel tank that I think I can get rid of with a sacrificial object on the build platform.

ABS on a Wanhao Duplicator 4S

I simply can not get the fine details from a ABS print that I can from PLA on the Ultimaker.  I know that ABS is capable...just not on the Ultimaker?  I feel like I am missing something but I have tried everything that I know how to do and still have not succeeded.

In my mind it is all about cooling.  I had a custom cooling fan on the Wanhao that directed a tiny but powerful airflow onto the part that was being extruded right under the nozzle.  I need this for the Ultimaker but have not found one out there in the wild.  I may actually have to design one.

You might ask why it is important to print ABS?  Namely that I find it to be a lot easier to clean an ABS print of the support material from the printing process!

Yet Another Look at Resolution

Printer did not want to play nice for this demo, at least at first. Only printed the tops of vehicles to save time. Resolutions are, from left to right, 150, 100, 80, 60, and 40 microns. Print times from 30 minutes to an hour and sixteen. Note on printing at very high resolution...I found that you need to use high infill and a lot of solid layers on top to avoid holes.  I know that I could probably due some tuning on bridging to alleviate this but the multiple layers also help the finish appearance.

3D Print Technologies - Three Technologies

There are three major 3D Printing technologies that comprise the bulk of the current market for small desktop/deskside printers.  They are Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), Stereolithography (SLA), and Selective Laser Sintering (SLS).  Later there may be some pictures of three tanks printed using these three technologies but first a little more introduction.

FDM is the technology that most people will have seen and/or heard about as it is used in most printers that people are buying for personal use.  Plastic filament in either 1.75, 2.85, or 3mm diameters are fed into a heated nozzle that extrudes the plastic in a thin line.  The layer of plastic extruded can be a variety of thicknesses but the range of .1mm to .2mm, or 100 microns to 200 microns, is the most common. The printer builds a solid object one layer at a time with either the build platform, usually surfaced with a piece of glass, falling or the extruder assembly with the nozzle rising.   Much more here!

SLA uses a laser focused on a liquid resin causing it to harden with a similar result as described above as the model is built one layer at a time...but generally on a platform that is rising from a vat of the resin!  The light is projected onto the bottom of the vat, the build platform starts the print touching the bottom of the vat, and with each layer the build platform is raised.   The Form 1, a very popular SLA printer, is an example for this printing technology.  Much more here! 

Added after the fact:  There are a lot of inexpensive printers coming to the market that do resin based printing but use either a projector (DLP) or an LCD (DUP) to harden the plastic.  More on the Wanhao D7 DUP printer later in this blog.

SLS has been around long enough for patents to start to expire leading to printers of its ilk starting to come down in price and hence be seen more often.  It uses a laser to sinter a powder, a layer at a time (there is a theme here), into a 3D object.  Sintering, btw, is heating and compressing something but not melting it.  In this process a powdered material is delivered layer by layer to the build platform where a laser does the sintering.  The build platform lowers as each layer is sintered. Much more here!

FDM and SLA both share a common characteristic in that the object being printed will have rely on what are called support structures to print elements of the model that would otherwise be "printed on air".  More about this later.  SLS does not need support structures because the powder from each layer remains and provides that support.  It can print crazy geometries and the part comes off the printer clean.    I have never seen an SLS printer in person but it sounds kinda messy even if the part is clean.  Maybe not as messy as an SLA printer with its resin but messy.   Still if the price comes down I may have to have one!

There is one other printer technology worth mentioning and that is multi jet.  Shapeways offers this as their Frosted Detail Plastic which is one of their more expensive offerings.  It prints at a layer thickness of less than 20 microns and does so with one jet spraying a wax support material and another the actual plastic for the model.  I have not done a print using this technology due to the cost but the pictures that I have seen are impressive.   All the advantages of the SLS printer but with the look of an SLA print but at even better detail.   Yours for $20000!

The 3D printing space is rapidly evolving with new printers and printing technology hitting the market all the time.  This article was probably out of date before I pressed save!

Next...some tanks!

Intersection of 3D Printing and Modeling - Another Diorama

While not at all a finished project the diorama shown below does illustrate the birth of another heavily 3D Printed diorama (here is my first one).  I keep getting distracted by other projects but I will ultimately finish this thing.  In case you are wondering about the shape...it fits a stack of shelves that I printed for my man cave.

Below are the first couple of prints.  On the bottom is the foundation for the diorama with a footprint for a ruined building, a sidewalk of concrete slabs, and a cobble stone street with some shell holes.  At the top are the ruined building, a model who's files I purchased downloaded and printed, and to the right are some initial pieces of bling to decorate the project.

Here I have painted the street and started to landscape the are outside the ruined building.  It is hard to tell from this print but I have another print that has added a layer of ground in the area at the top left of the diorama.  In hind-sight there were a number of things that should have been designed into the initial print above, or out of in the case of much of the time that I put into sidewalk that I then covered!

Most of the heavy duty landscaping is now done.  Note that I am very much a beginning modeler so please humor me in my attempts on this project.  Like the two colors of earth with the darker being older and the lighter being newer...?

In the below two shots we see a traditional model from Battlefront integrated into the diorama.  We can also see, particularly in the shot that looks into the ruined building, some of the bling that I have designed for Flames of War gamers.  The tank is a high resolution print of a model done by M_Bergman and available on Thingiverse along with all of my bling.

Not quite the end by any means but getting close.  My vision is to replace the Panther with a Tiger II and to have figures populating the model.

Some Pictures of Bling

This post is actually just a placeholder for some pictures of various FoW Bling!

Barrels

Tires

Lumber

Well

Outhouse

Drums

Laundry

Basic Wagon 

Upgraded Field Wagon

Tale of Two Marvins

Someone had asked what settings I was using for ABS on my Ultimakers referring to problems they were having with printing the Marvin calibration object.  I had not printed a Marvin in a while so did the below as a test.   They are not perfect but they are pretty decent.  Left is ABS and right is PLA.  Both at 80 micron layer height.

Simplify 3D profiles used for the above: ABS PLA

Tale of Two Materials (PLA and ABS)

My first printer, the Prusa I3, was a completely open printer with a 12v heated platform.  It printed PLA well and ABS pretty much not at all given the time it took heating up the platform and then the issues with prints adhering to the build platform at all in my drafty man-cave.

Enter the Wanhao Duplicator 4S.  It was a completely enclosed printer with a 24v heated build platform and it did ABS brilliantly.  It still took time to heat the build platform but I was ok with that....first, because it really did do ABS well, but second as I was NEVER able to get it to print PLA well!  No matter what build surface treatment that I tried I could not get reliable print adhesion.  I know that I should have been able to get past this but I could not in the time I gave myself so I just printed ABS, brilliantly, I might add.

Now we are in the Ultimaker age and I am largely printing PLA.  To me it seems like the stock UM2 is really designed more for PLA than ABS given that it is partially open.   In my man cave this results in print adhesion and warping issues so I got a door and a cover for both of my printers.   Now I can print either ABS or PLA on either printer.

So what are the benefits of one material over the other?   PLA is much, much easier for me to print with on the Ultimaker 2.  Print adhesion is more straight forward (clean build platform and hairspray) and things are just so much faster given a build platform temperature of 60 versus 110.  The other worry with PLA is that it has a pretty low melting point and I can envision parts being left somewhere and getting hot enough to warp (hot car even though probably not in the UK)!  

PLA is also bio-degradable which is both a good thing from a landfill perspective but could be a bad thing if your print bio degrades out from under you!  In reality I have seen no evidence of PLA bio degrading in normal use.  I even have some shelves under the kitchen sink where they are frequently wet and after more than a year they are just fine.

Finally, and obviously importantly, I think that PLA looks a little more crisp than PLA.  I need to document this as it may only be subjective but the combination of this with the speed and ease of PLA has me liking PLA a lot better than ABS.   Except.

So what is the quandary?  Simply the issue of prints that need supporting material.  No matter how I tweak my setting it is still a real pain in the ass to get the support off the PLA prints.   The major variables are temperature...need to print as cool as possible so the layers don't rebond and then some slicing settings that control the offset between the support and the working part.  With either material I like to print plenty extra support material (inflation distance on Simplify 3D) but the setting that seems to make the most difference is the separation distance between layers but this comes issues on the parts that I have been printing in terms of some stray extrusion strands!

So I am back to thinking about using ABS for prints that require a lot of support material!  But I like PLA better.  That is the quandary.