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SoliForum - 3D Printing Community → Help/Repair/Maintenance → ABS to PLA and Back again.
I am new and I have no shame in admitting that, I however have various projects that require different material. I have searched for an answer or a guide and have not seen a difinitive answer. So I ask what is the best procedure to go from one material to the other and vice versa?
-K
I've never used PLA, but if I had to venture a guess I'd say keep different hotends on hand for the different types of plastic you want to print with. So a hotend for pla and another for abs and so on.
Switching hot ends is very difficult with the stock Solidoodle, but Lawsy just came up with a better design that would allow you to swap hot ends quickly and easily. Perhaps one of your first projects should be to print that new extruder design.
I've recently used PLA after only using ABS in the past. I didn't have any clogs when printing with the PLA but after pulling the nozzle off for other reasons there was still ABS inside the nozzle and on the brass barrel threads that hadn't melted and come out.
It's likely that a piece of the ABS may come loose and clog the PLA printing at some stage, since PLA prints at a lower temp which is not hot enough to properly melt any ABS in the system.
My solution to be extra safe is to have two different hot ends, but this may be overkill.
I've switched back and forth a bit lately. To be on the safe side, I've been pushing a stiff wire down into the hot end to force any remaining plastic out before sending the new filament in. That way incoming or outgoing PLA won't be at an elevated temp for very long. There is a bit of overlap between the two, were a little too cool for ABS meets a little too hot for PLA.
Switching hot ends is very difficult with the stock Solidoodle, but Lawsy just came up with a better design that would allow you to swap hot ends quickly and easily. Perhaps one of your first projects should be to print that new extruder design.
Probably gonna print that next. I noticed (by removing some clogged filament) that the "F" piece of acrylic is broken, thing is 2 days old.
We've been trying PLA after using ABS. Haven't had any clogging problems, but the switch was from black abs to white pla, and that abs comes out randomly making for an ugly part.
I think we will be printing up the Lawsy extruder mount and getting an extra hot end just for the different plastics. I do have a question though. Will each extruder need it's own PID settings for the firmware? and how would you switch between them?
I've switched back and forth a bit lately. To be on the safe side, I've been pushing a stiff wire down into the hot end to force any remaining plastic out before sending the new filament in. That way incoming or outgoing PLA won't be at an elevated temp for very long. There is a bit of overlap between the two, were a little too cool for ABS meets a little too hot for PLA.
I'm not sure this really does get all the plastic out of the extruder as the brass threaded tube has a larger inner diameter than the 1.7mm peek opening.
We've been trying PLA after using ABS. Haven't had any clogging problems, but the switch was from black abs to white pla, and that abs comes out randomly making for an ugly part.
I think we will be printing up the Lawsy extruder mount and getting an extra hot end just for the different plastics. I do have a question though. Will each extruder need it's own PID settings for the firmware? and how would you switch between them?
If they are different style hot ends then the different PIDs will help performance a lot. In this case you can add an M301 Pxx Ixx Dxx gcode command to your start gcode. If you are using slicer/RH it can be saved in a profile and selected before you slice.
Since PLA is considered food safe and ABS is not would this be a hazard with using one hotend?
Since PLA is considered food safe and ABS is not would this be a hazard with using one hotend?
It would but just the nature of how FFF works would not be considered food safe. Most materials that are rated for contact with food are only rated in context with certain manufacturing standards and fused filament fabrication is not one of them.
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