Welcome to the SeeMeCNC Community

Hi all,

I just did something that really helped print quality on my Rostock so I thought I'd share. I can only suspect that this has been done before but I'll toss it out there.

I'm just starting my initial experimentation with printing on my Rostock and I have to say I'm extremely impressed with it. On the friday before labor day I started my third print on it which was a 51 hour print of a center fuselage section for an RC aircraft I'm designing. I started the print and when I came back to work the next tuesday it had finished! There were tons of layer separation issues but I was still pretty impressed.


Soooooooo, I did a redesign of the part to reduce weight ad printed it again (cut in half) and as expected once again I had serious layer separations.

I figured that a heated enclosure would help but didn't really feel like building a big a$$ box around my Rostock so I thought I'd heat the part in the build volume via simple thermal radiation. I did some horrible things to a parabolic radiant space heater so I could tilt it and CHANGING NOTHING I hit print on the same part.

Print results were WAAAAAAAAAYYYYYY better.

Heat definitely helps. I've solved many of my own printing problems by just cranking up the temps (currently using 240c/110c for ABS).

This reminds me of the alternative heated enclosure that has been talked about lately that used a 100w incandescent reflector bulb to heat the print chamber... I guess the moral of the story is that whether you've got an enclosed volume of air or not, an increased temperature envelope will help a print.

Be safe, I wouldn't leave that setup unattended!