DutchMogul has done it again. I’m loving printing his latest board game, Breach. But I ran into a problem with the Star Goddess that I’ve seen before with ABS when narrow layers printed in isolation melt together. It’s even more pronounced when I print the handle for my soap stamps. It doesn’t happen if there’s something else the same height printing with it. So printing 2 copies will often fix the problem.
When asking Joe Sadusk about it he suggested it was the time spend on each layer or number of shells, since I was printing with just 1. So I thought I’d do a little experiment and see what I can see. I tried different shells and different minimum layer times. The results were mostly the same, changing minimum layer times didn’t fix a thing, adding shells only fixed a little.
At this point I’m thinking the problem isn’t the minimum layer time, it’s that the hot end never leaves the area and lets the ABS cool a bit. Sadusk said they’d tried it one time but it left droolies on the print, which I can imagine. Having a nozzle idle does cause it to drool. Unless you had a brush to clean the print head on before printing, which the Makerbot does not, that drool would just be stuck to the print. However, I thought of a workaround, a sacrificial tower printed on the build plate. I’d employed something similar before, so I thought I’d give it a try this time.
