ABS printed layers are separating

[esbowman]

Any ideas on what could be causing this? Notice the layer separation. It separated after 20 or so layers above it. There's also a minor break below the bigger one. My extruder is running at 200C, bed is at 95C. Is this just typical ABS warping? I'm a newbie to this whole thing and would love some advice. The other hunch I have, is that I should have kept the infill instead of using the infill where needed option in Slic3r. I'm thinking if it had support throughout the whole model it would have not separated?

Thoughts?

Cuddling Owls model - ABS layer break

[guanu]

the problem is printing abs at 200.. run it at 225 and see what happens =)
also make sure you are not running the layer fan that blows at the nozzle

Guanu

[esbowman]

Sounds good. I'll try it again later. Layer fan is definitely off. Funny thing is that I had the nozzle at 225 at first, but it dropped to 200 the moment I ran the Gcode in Repetier. Oh well, it's all a learning process right now. Having fun even making mistakes.

Thanks!

[esbowman]

Seems that advice worked a treat Guanu. I made certain the nozzle temp was 225C and the bed was at 90C. I ended up scaling the size of the STL way down and reprinted too. This thing is only 1 7/8" wide x 1 1/2" tall now. I know that's a pretty small print, so I don't know what I should expect to see in terms of quality but I'd love a second look at this for advice on what could be going wrong. The only issue now, at least to my newbie eyes, is a minor separation at the top of this model. Here are some photos:

Top View

Cuddling Owls - top view - small print.

Front View

Cuddling Owls - front view - small print

Original File came from here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:50212

Here's my hunch. I set the infill again to "only infill where needed", however I think I had the density set pretty low. I'm wondering if it really needed more structure there. Regarding speed, I had the printer turned down to 40% speed. It felt like a reasonable speed for the size, and you'll see in the pics that the quality seems pretty damn good. Right?

Just curious and trying to tweak/tune this bad boy to it's fullest potential. Being a newbie, I'm not quite sure what to expect from it. So far I'm super happy with the results though. Thanks again!

[guanu]

looks good, for capping the top, the way to fix that is more top/bottom layers and perimeters... adding infill or making infill more dense will give the top layers like that something to sit on so they dont seperate in like that to make the gaps. otherwise, the print looks like you got it goin good!

Guanu

[esbowman]

Sweet. That makes sense. Thanks again!

[gajtguy]

Just curious how long that last print took, with the given settings you mentioned? I have yet to print anything and I'm starting to wonder about print times.. Thanks

[esbowman]

Gajtguy, that took roughly 1.5 hours. It was really small however with infill set to "only where needed" and I had the speed at roughly 45%. I've found that small details really need a slower speed to keep it from stringing, but that's understandable. On simpler parts in which I'm not worried about the smoothness, I've been cranking it to 200% and I'm amazed at how accurate it still manages to print. Hope that helps?

[bubbasnow]

just a side note, drafts can also cause this on those really tall long prints.