Hello everyone, I am new to FDM printing (just got my Bambu P1S) and while my experience with PLA so far is going well I am having trouble printing with ASA and I don’t know what is wrong or how to fix it.
Attached are some photos of a Benchy I printed to highlight the print quality issues.
Filament: Creality HP Series ASA Black
I read that ASA can struggle with moisture so I purchased a dryer and dried it for 8 hours to try and eliminate that but no improvement.
I am using the standard 0.4 nozzle and the Bambulab slicer on 0.20mm layer height - standard setting. I used the generic ASA profile that is using 260 deg nozzle temperature (filament box specified 240-260).
Most ASA and ABS profiles have little cooling. While this is good for layer adhesion, it is inadequate for small, fast layers. You may need to go into the filament profile and change the cooling settings. If you upload a screenshot of those settings, I’ll suggest some changes.
Drying your filament is a good first step, drying longer might still help. If you have a digital scale, dry until the filament loses less than a gram in an hour.
Learn to calibrate temperature, flow rate, and pressure advance. OrcaSlicer has a very good collection of calibration models in the top line menu.
You can make wild guesses at correct values, or try using settings from others that worked on their printers with a different filament and a different color. I prefer to find my own optimum settings for each filament, it saves time and wasted filament in the long run.
The aux/part cooling fan combined with reducing nozzle temperature to 240 seemed to make a huge improvement on the benchy. Is there a rule of thumb as to what size part I need to do this for or how fast the fan should be set to? Sounds like if I print a very large part than I would want to turn down or off the fan right?
Can you share a screenshot of your cooling tab? Adjustments I would make are to the min/ max and timing. Then once I have those, I would leave them for everything, but I can show you what I do.
movingimage, this is the cooling tab from the final test print that seemed to solve it for the benchy print. I did 80% and it seemed to make a huge improvement.
It sounds like the smaller the print the more fan speed I need, I just dont know what that threshold is or if every new print will be trial and error. I am concerned about layer strength as some of the ASA parts I intend to print need the strength.
If you are concerned about layer adhesion, you could try a max fan of 70 instead of 80. And, also lower the min time from 35 to something like 20 or 15. Lots of cooling still happens in 20 seconds without much fan, no reason to have it higher between 20-35 secs. I’d keep overhang fan at 80-100.
You could also set your “slow down for better layer cooling” to 15. This will further help tiny layers…if you go too slow it can melt the part…so don’t go below 10.
The other thing that helps with layer adhesion (and warping) with ASA is to heat the chamber to 45+. Do this by maxing out the heated bed before starting the print, and setting the aux fan to 100%. let the printer sit this way with the door closed and lid on for 10-15 min, or until you reach 42-43C chamber temp. Then send the print job. It’ll heat the rest of the way as it gets going.
