Recently purchased a roll of ASA-CF for my x1c with AMS 2 Pro. Dried the filament for 12 hrs on the bed as recommended.
The roll is so brittle that it breaks off in the process of loading/identifying the spool, forcing me to fish it out of the PFTE tube. I’ve been printing with regular ASA for months with no issues. Tried multiple times, breaks off every time.
Issue mostly seems when retracting it, it winds it too tightly off to the side of the spool, where it snaps. however, even slight bends will make the filament snap too
Anyone have any experience with ASA-CF? Is this a bad spool? I put in a ticket, but would like some input from others.
It’s usually quite brittle, but not that brittle when properly dried. How did you dry it?
My sequence of CF/GF from least brittle to most brittle:
PLA-CF → PETG-CF → ABS-GF → ASA-CF - (safely use with AMS when the filament path is optimized) → PPS-CF - (VERY CAREFULLY use with AMS when the filament path is CAREFULLY optimized) → PPA-CF (impossible with AMS)
I recently bought and used a roll of ASA-CF, I did not dry it before hand as it came out of the vacuum pack. I very rarely dry fresh filament. It went thru my AMS with no problems and I have printed about 10 hours worth.
As it is a brittle product (more so than PLA-Cf etc) I think drying it makes it more brittle. Just a slight deflection when handling leads to breaks.
ASA is actually more brittle when wet. With the possible exception of PLA, it is safest to assume that any new spool of filament contains moisture. The only way to be certain a spool is truly dry is to weigh, dry, weigh, repeat, until weight stops dropping. Drying for a specific time fails because starting moisture is unknown, you are most likely over- or under-drying.
Since I lack a suitable dryer, I used the bed, dried for 12 hrs at 90 (I do have a Sunlu dryer besides the AMS2, but doesn’t get high enough)
After a little bit of testing, I was able to get a couple of plates printed. On the second plate, it snapped, but the print paused and I was able to continue after re-feeding the filament.
What seems to be happening, is that in the process of loading/unloading, the filament on the spool winds itself to the sides and embeds itself in the filament beneath it (too tight?) which causes an abrupt bend that snaps the filament. I had this happen too on a fresh ABS spool, but the filament wouldn’t break, it just wound itself so tight that it digged itself into the spool.
I also had a tiny bit of stringing and some inconsistencies in the print quality, but I’m hoping a calibration will solve that, although being black filament, on the black smooth PEI plate, that will be difficult for auto calibration (and my eyesight is not the best anymore for manual!)
The spool is just stuffed to the brim, so I’m assuming as I use some of it, this will diminish somewhat.
Bit unrelated but I too had the spool like this, overfilled to the edge it scratches the feed funnel white plastics that AMS had trouble loading/unwinding until I used up some of it. Kind of surprising given that similarly low density ABS-GF (1.08 g/cm³) had completely normal spools (vs. ASA-CF 1.02 g/cm³).
Ok, so I stuck with this spool of ASA-CF, and after about 20% or so of the spool was gone, the issue completely disappeared. I’ve actually come to like the material and I’m planning on buying more, but… I’ll spool off a certain amount of it before installing it to avoid the headache.
I need help myself I am having a horrible time getting any strength out of multiple rolls of fiberon asa-cf any print I make easily breaks under two fingers, I have dried them for countless hours I have printed them while drying them, I’ve tweaked print setting going hotter, slower, turned fan speed low and off, I have a P1S so I preheat the chamber before the prints and nothing has worked