I'm printing a frame for a wall-socket to hide some wall-dent-ugliness behind it. I printed a prototype in PLA to get the measurements right, and now I'm considering printing the "use" version with ABS. Since I have no experience with ABS as a printing material, I'm wondering if it experiences a different shrinkage than PLA on cooldown and if I would need to scale the model accordingly when printing with ABS as opposed to PLA. Or maybe I'm thinking too much about this and the shrinkage is so small that it doesn't really matter when printing things with a tolerange of 0.5mm?
Hi srd, I have printed a number of items in ABS. From my experience as long as the print does not lift off the print bed and it is allowed to cool down before removing, then I've had no issues with shrinkage. I must point out that this is done on a fully enclosed print bed. Here's a picture showing prints from the same file done in both PLA (green) and ABS (black). The ABS has been cold vapour smoothed. The best thing to do is try printing it and see for yourself.
Very nice. Thanks for mentioning the cold vapor smoothing. Hadn't heard of it before. I'll give it a try and see what happens.
For this project in particular? Because I have another thing that I need to print for my kitchen that will be right next to the stovetop, so I'll need the resiliance of ABS. And I'll gain some ABS experience with the project before moving on to the more difficult project where I'll definitely need ABS. In general... you know. Why climb mountains? Gain experience, see what else is out there, discover new things. Kind of like why I got the printer in the first place.