A Neat Trick To 3D Print With Fewer Warping Issues

November 1, 2024 by Lewin Day 25 Comments

Warping! It messes up your 3D printed parts, turning them into a useless, dimensionally-inaccurate mess. You can design your parts around it, or try and improve your printer in various ways. Or, you can check out some of the neat tricks [Jan] has to tackle it.

The basic concept is a particularly valuable one. [Jan] notes that ABS and PLA are relatively compatible. In turn, he found that printing ABS parts on top of a thin layer of PLA has proven a great way to improve bed adhesion and reduce warping. He’s extended this technique further to other material combinations, too. The trick is to find two materials that adhere well to each other, where one is better at adhering to typical print beds. Thus, one can be used to help stick the other to the print bed. [Jan] also explains how to implement these techniques with custom G-Code and manual filament changes.

We’ve been discussing the issue of warping prints quite often of late. It’s a common problem we all face at one time or another! Video after the break.

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What Actually Causes Warping In 3D Prints?

October 14, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 35 Comments

The 3D printing process is cool, but it’s also really annoying at times. Specifically, when you want to get a part printed, and no matter how you orientate things, what adhesion aids you use or what slicer settings you tweak, it just won’t print right. [David Malawey] has been thinking a little about the problem of the edges of wide prints tending to curl upwards, and we believe they may be on to something.

Obviously, we’re talking about the lowest common denominator of 3D printing, FDM, here. Other 3D printing technologies have their gotchas. Anyway, when printing a wide object, edge curling or warping is a known annoyance. Many people will just try it and hope for the best. When a print’s extreme ends start peeling away from the heat bed, causing the print to collide with the head, they often get ripped off the bed and unceremoniously ejected onto the carpet. Our first thought will be, “Oh, bed adhesion again”, followed by checking the usual suspects: bed temperature, cleanliness and surface preparation. Next, we might add a brim or some sacrificial ‘bunny ears’ to keep those pesky edges nailed down. Sometimes this works, but sometimes not. It can be frustrating. [David] explains in the YouTube short how the contraction of each layer of materials is compounded by its length, and these stresses accumulate as the print layers build. A simple demonstration shows how a stack of stressed sections will want to curl at the ends and roll up inwards.

This mechanism would certainly go some way to explain the way these long prints behave and why our mitigation attempts are sometimes in vain. The long and short of it is to fix the issue at the design stage, to minimize those contraction forces, and reduce the likelihood of edge curling.

Does this sound familiar? We thought we remembered this, too, from years ago. Anyway, the demonstration was good and highlighted the issue well.

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A Technique To Avoid Warping On Large 3D Prints

November 15, 2011 by Mike Szczys 42 Comments

[Jamie Mantzel] figured out his own way of 3D printing large objects without fear of warping. First a bit of background information. When using a 3D extrusion printer like the RepRap or Makerbot, prints that span a large area tend to warp. That’s because these printers lay down one thin layer of plastic at a time. If the first layer cools too much, it will shrink a bit before the next layer is laid down. As that second layer cools it pulls the part toward the center, eventually bowing the part which causes it to hit the extruder head.

After having several prints encounter this issue [Jamie] decided to alter his design so that it wouldn’t cause these stresses. The first thing that he did was to add alternating voids to a layer between the raft and the actual part. You can see these as notches on the bottom the piece pictured above. This takes care of the initial stresses from the first layer. Next, he adds holes wherever he can in the main body of the part. This is especially important on the edges of the piece where the warping forces will be the greatest.

He also moved the starting position of the bed closer to the extruder head. His hope is that this will help the raft bond better, and resist pulling away from the bed during printing.

See his video explanation of his adventure after the break.

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