Getting ABS to stick to the printbed

I could barely get anything to stick to the kapton, so I went ot a glass bed and hairspray never looked back.  do most of my prints at 70c and have almost no issues with sticking.

I use acetone(nail polish) with a little scrap ABS dissolved in it. put about a teaspoon in the middle of the cold bed and wipe it around with a paper towel.   Never had a sticking problem with this. Only reapply when needed.

Yes, you are right.  The hairspray gels and evens out onto the surface, and there is very little roughness to it after being heated.  And I think the reason that roughening the glass doesn't help is that the hairspray just fills the gaps, and still creates a smooth surface on top, so it makes really no difference.

I was thinking of etching the glass so I wouldn't have to use hair spray.

This has been tried before, and it doesn't work, unfortunately.

Yes, printing with stock Kapton works fine for some people.  This is what Solidoodle recommends.  Also, acetone is not an additive that you apply.  It is only used to clean the surface of oils, etc.  It has very high volatility, so it evaporates almost instantly.

I 'm using the first bottle my wife had laying around, Ion Anti-Frizz Hard-to-Hold hair spray and it works quite well.  I also cleans up very easy with rubbing alcohol.

http://www.sallybeauty.com/hair-spray/S … lt,pd.html

So far I've used it directly on the Kapton and it works well at 100°C, but I have to spray it on when the bed is relatively cold, and wait about 5 minutes before starting to heat the bed.  The models come off pretty easy once the printbed cools off.  I stick a credit card underneath and pop it off.

Oh, I also found that printing a 4-5mm brim around the model prevents the corners from lifting and curling up during long prints.

I don't generally, but it just so happens that I removed the glass to get my print off last night and was called away. I came back and went to start another print. I was surprised when the printer started printing in the air, what now I thought. Keep in mind it was about 1in the morning. I couldn't figure out how my z home had changed by about 2 mm. I reset it to .3mm and started a 4.5 hour 200 layer print. It finished up over night, this morning I sat down and said "what's this piece of glass doing on my desk?" Sure enough, I had reset the Z height and printed on the kapton. It worked, but I find the glass/hairspray combo to work well and is more reliable. The print came off the kapton quite easily, much more so than it would have come off the glass.
As for what kind, I bought the cheapest unscented brand that they had at the grocery store, Aquanet. I only reapply it every 8 or 9 prints and I tend to move the objects around on the print bed a bit to cover different areas of the bed as I print.

TiM

I have seen some place on the web ( and have done so myself when out of kapton tape ) use of blue painters tape, It did work for me when I was desperate and waiting for my kapton roll to come. But I will say from experience with both the Kapton is better then the blue painters tape.

A friend of mine though went to an extreme and did on his glass sheet an acid etch surface and then rubs that down with acetone before a print, and that seems to work for him and I have wanted to try it, but have yet to do so.

I couldn't find any hairspray, but the closest sticky thing I could find was a UHU glue stick which seems to have solved the stick issue... and cheap too :-)

Back when I had my heat box installed I was able to resolve sticking problems without having to use hairspray.  Now (because I thought the problem with the errors I was getting was due to the heat box causing the electronics to overheat) I ditched that and now just use hairspray on kapton at a bed temp of 75c.

I've realized the core problem with print curling is that the infill creates these lines connecting opposite sides of the printed perimeter.  After each layer of infill cools it basically "pulls" the extremities of the print in and this puts tremendous pressure on the bottom edges until they end up lifting off the print bed whether you have something that is holding it or not.  Using a heat box basically drastically reduces the effect of infill pulling on the perimeter by preventing such a high level of contraction due to cooling.

I think the degree of "differences" of opinion you see on forums about how well one print curling solution works vs. another is due to subtle variations in print settings and mechanical tolerances that creates a very very wide range of how each line/string/portion of infill actually bonds to the print perimeter.  Hence, the level of differences in suitability of each "hack".

One strategy to combat curling due to infill is to model voids inside the solid areas of the print where possible.  Try to break up the infill in such a way that you can't draw a line through the infill from one side to the other without hitting a gap along the way.  Here is an example -

http://hackaday.com/2011/11/15/a-techni … 3d-prints/