3d Printing ASA For Beginners (Ender 3) Most Underrated Filament?

on this channel we've covered quite a few different filaments for fdm printers or extrusion-based 3d printers it's been really exciting to see since the time that i got into 3d printing the evolving of this technology with things like independent dual extrusion and automatic bed leveling that actually works well but to me one of the most exciting things is the the evolution of the 3d printing filaments from just having pla to having now such a wide variety of different filaments to choose from for whatever project or whatever your use case might be sure some of these materials can be a bit difficult to print with and require a special set of hardware but some of the other filaments can actually be printed on just about any 3d printer that you can get on the market today well in today's video we're going to take a look at what to me is one of the most underrated filaments out there called asa asa is an awesome filament it's great for any of your projects that are going to be primarily outside or exclusively outside it's got really good tensile strength it's got really good heat deflection and what really sets it apart for the rest is its ability to resist uv or its uv resistance meaning that it's not going to discolor nearly as fast as other filaments outside it's not going to degrade nearly as fast as other filaments outside so again for anything that needs to have high strength and needs to be used outside this is a fantastic option so in today's video we are going to take a look at asa we're going to go over its properties a bit more we're going to see and show you how to print with this material correctly and of course we're going to do some asa printing so i hope you guys are excited and without further ado let's get right into today's video [Music] other than the uv resistance asa is incredibly similar to abs so the print parameters the ability to be post-processed by using acetone and vapor smoothing all of those things carry over to asa as well the main difference is that in asa acrylate rubber is used which through tough rubbering gives asa up to 10 times the weather and uv resistance the abs has as such it's very popular for automotive parts or parts that are going to be used outside permanently this material has a heat deflection temperature of around 200 fahrenheit and a tensile strength of 42 megapascals for today's video we're going to be using filamentum's afrikite gray asa we're going to be printing on my modified ender 3 however you will see in a moment here that none of these modifications are required to actually print with asa although some of them i will recommend you can print this on a stock under three so we'll get into that so with abs i typically print around 235 or 240 celsius on the hot end but i feel like in my experience with asa asa typically likes to be printed a bit hotter so anywhere between 245 and 255 is usually the sweet spot now with that being said that does mean that you can print this on a non-all metal hot end so like the ender 3 with its ptfe lined hot end i typically don't recommend taking it above 245 and i certainly don't recommend taking it above 250 in fear that you'll actually damage your hot end and melt the teflon lining inside of that hot end but at 245 to right around that 250 mark you can get away with printing this on the stock hotend i always say i think that one of the best upgrades you can do is add an all metal hotend so that way you're not limited to that but again if you don't want to touch your ender 3 or if you just want to try out asa you can get away with it using that stock hot end if you are looking to upgrade your hot end on your ender 3 the easiest one in my opinion is the one for micro swiss it is a direct drop in replacement so the install is crazy easy it doesn't require you to print out any additional parts which is also a huge plus luckily asa also is not abrasive so if you've got a brass nozzle that's fine you don't need a hardened steel or any sort of special nozzle to be able to print with asa as far as heated bed goes this is something that you absolutely need asa just like abs is prone to warping so having a heated bed is not a thing that maybe you can get away with not having you absolutely need to have it and years ago this might have been a deal when there was lots of printers that didn't have heated beds but nowadays granted not all of them have it it's pretty common that most all 3d printers do come with some kind of a heated bed so you will need that as far as bed temperature goes you'll want to get your bed as hot as you can get it i would say 100 c minimum you can get away with going a little bit south at 90 if you can't quite hit 100 but 100 c minimum in my opinion if you can get it even hotter that's just going to help more with the bed adhesion but for the sake of like my ender 3 i set it to 100c when i'm printing with abs or in this instance with asa now for build surface with abs or asa a lot of people use a lot of different things so you can use like the standard build tack type sheet that comes on the ender three you can use glass with hairspray aqua net hairspray was a big thing that a lot of people used for abs back in the day and i still think there's quite a few people that use that um in my instance i'm going to be using buildtax flex plate system with pei i absolutely love pei for pla abs asa and pet so pei is going to be my recommendation but again there are other things you can use if you don't have pei accessible now you also are definitely going to want an enclosure you can get away with printing some maybe small pieces if you've got like the printer in a closet or in a kind of confined office space but anything of size is going to warp like crazy without an enclosure and you're going to get delamination or cracking amongst the layers so um i've got the wham-bam hotbox which is an awesome portable enclosure that i just quickly pop up when i need it throw it on top of my ender 3 do my prints and then when i'm done printing with the materials that require it i unzip two zippers and store it away so there's other enclosures out there there's acrylic enclosures there's diy stuff i've seen people use like um i think it's like foam board type stuff or insulated foam and you know there's all sorts of things you can do but again the wham bam hot box is what i use and i can link you guys down below to any of the stuff that i'm talking about if you want to take a look at it or purchase it for yourself now for the print i wanted to do something that was functional when i think of asa i think of functional parts and that's primarily what i love sure you could use it to make some kind of outside structure that you place that you want to be outside and that would be totally fine but for me i wanted to use something functional that i can actually use so i've been doing quite a bit of barbecuing over the last couple of months here and i try to barbecue nice and early but sometimes it just doesn't happen and i have to barbecue at nighttime and the light outside isn't very good so i use my phone light which kind of sucks trying to barbecue with one hand on your phone and just i would like to have a hands-free solution so browsing on thingiverse i found somebody that created a simple mount for the bar on his barbecue that just holds a small flashlight and i saw that idea and thought it was really awesome so i went ahead and took that concept and went outside took my digital calipers and measured my flashlight that i had which was bigger than the one he had and my grill that was slightly different so i took that idea it went infusion and kind of modeled my own take on it which was really simple it probably took me 15 to 20 minutes just to model a basic clamping system that used a couple of heat inserts and m3 screws and then a another little clamp to grab onto the flashlight so that is what i am going to be printing so heading over to kira we're going to be starting off with their generic abs profile that's built right in to the slicer under the material settings i'm going to change the temperatures from what it's set to for abs to 245 celsius because like i said i typically notice that asa likes to print a bit hotter and i'm going to set the bed temperature to 100 celsius as far as layer height and infill that will be completely up to you but for me i'm going to be using a standard 0.2 millimeter layer height with a slightly larger point t4 first layer just to help make sure that the part is getting good adhesion i'm going to be doing four top four bottom and four wall layers or shells and i'm going to be using 20 infill which is also kind of a standard for me for print speeds i'm going to be sticking with the defaults which is 25 millimeters a second on the bottom and 50 millimeters a second for the general printing my default infill for some reason was at 100 millimeters a second but i'm gonna be dropping that to 50 millimeters as well you can definitely scale this up depending on your printer but i always recommend starting off safe to ensure success before ramping things up as for the fan speed this is another thing that for abs and asa you'll hear different things on some print with no fan while others have it on fully in my experience it really depends on your parts geometry how steep the overhangs are and the bridges i usually set the fan speed as off for the first five layers and then kick it on to just 50 power for the remainder of the print and for adhesion if your part does not have a large surface area you may want to turn on brim but for this part i'm just going to go ahead and go with a skirt to make sure that the nozzle is plenty primed and that's what i typically run for most all of my materials so when i started off the print i noticed that after the first layer was going down it seemed like the filament wasn't sticking really well to the pei which i found odd and after looking a little bit closer at my pei i clearly saw that there was some residue on there from prints i had done previously so i went ahead and got some ipa on a paper towel and just did a really quick wipe down of the pei and restarted the print and the build plate adhesion was significantly better so that is definitely something to remember that having good 3d printing maintenance and making sure that if you touch your pei that you wipe it off because you've got oils in your fingers or again in my instance there was residue but having a clean build plate is very important for proper adhesion so i did re-level the build plate before this print because i had glass on previously when i showed you guys how to print with the carbon fiber nylon but i still seem to have the nozzle slightly a bit too close so the first couple of layers don't look that nice until it cleans itself up in general i typically print with the nozzle a little bit too close versus a little bit too far just because in the past i've had instances where i've had a print that looks pretty good about the nozzles just maybe a hair too far and maybe hours into the print it actually comes loose from the bed so in my instance especially having a flex plate and making it really easy to remove i typically prefer to have the nozzle just a hair closer and kind of push into the pei a bit versus again not having it close enough and losing the print altogether so other than that the part turned out great and after inserting the heat inserts in the part i now have a really handy flashlight holder for those late night grilling sessions asa is also really popular for automotive again for the reasons i mentioned earlier but also its ability to be vapor smooth and giving it a really clean look so i went ahead and found just a simple toyota badge over on thingiverse that i figured i had a long time ago painted my toyota badge black but thought it'd be kind of cool just to have a dark toyota badge that wasn't just plasti-dip so i downloaded that and i slice it up i did go ahead and use a brim on this model just because it was a little bit bigger and it didn't have to me the best surface uh like the biggest surface area to actually get proper adhesion so i added a brim on the outside and other than that i left all of the settings the exact same as the original model so the print turned out great and the brim came off really easily actually when i popped off the badge the badge came off and the brim stayed in place so that worked out really well but i did notice after looking at it that the surface kind of had a stair step and looking at the model on my computer i saw that it kind of was a low resolution badge and there was some pretty obvious roughness on the surface of the of the cad file so what i ended up doing was was grabbing a tiny square of 150 grit sandpaper and another beautiful thing about abs and asa is that it sands incredibly easily so with just i don't know a minute or two of some quick sanding back and forth i was able to completely buffer out the rough surface and the stair stepping on that asa print i don't know if i'll actually end up doing it but i may end up vapor smoothing this because it would be a really cool to have this badge look a little bit glossier than kind of the flat natural look that the asa and abs filament tends to have so that's really it that's all you need to do to be able to print with asa filament if you follow these steps outlined in this video then you should be in pretty good shape and again depending on your machine and depending on your environment you may need to tweak these settings a little bit but that's at least a really good foundation to print with asa filament let me know in the comments down below if you've anybody that's done a lot of asa printing or even abs printing if you've got any other tips or tricks that you think might be useful for others and if you do end up printing out with asa for the first time after watching this video let me know in the comments down below how that works out and what you decided to print because i think that functional parts and parts that are outside are awesome and so i always like seeing what kind of cool crazy stuff people are up to on that note i hope you guys enjoyed this video don't forget to like and subscribe for more great videos i make a video every single saturday so there is always fresh content coming your way and if you want to support the channel furthermore i'll place links in the description to my patreon there's some really awesome rewards there and i want to give a huge thank you to all of my current patreon supporters you guys are awesome and i really appreciate you guys allowing me to spend more time doing what i love which is making content for you guys on that note this has been daniel from modbot i look forward to seeing you guys in my next video and i'm out peace guys

Channel: ModBot

Views: 65,837

Rating: 4.8839288 out of 5

Keywords: asa ender 3, abs ender 3, asa, how to print with asa, 3d printing asa, printing abs, 3d printing abs, best filament for outdoors, printing asa, high strength 3d printing, outdoor 3d printing

Id: Zqbv3xH4w6c

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 17 2020