Hi all need a bit of help my CTC dual has been printing great be now i can not print a raft i am using makerbot the raft will not go down flat.
its just the base layer i can print great with no raft
printing with ABS 230 and a bed at 110
is the raft lifting? or its just not printing at all? i might suggest buying Buildtak tape so you avoid ABS lifting issues on any of your prints.
Blue tape with abs is not the best. ABS you should use capton or glass bed with ~100°C
Sorry, you say you’re using a Makerbot and a CTC? Or does the CTC use the Makerbot Desktop software to print?
Either way, check your level. It looks like you need to bring the build plate up just a few tenths of a millimeter.
EDIT: Oh, yeah. Blue tape and ABS, muy mal. But you can spray it with hairspray, and I mean really douse it, and let it dry, then try again. That may fix it.
Try a 50 or 60 degrees on the bed temp? Put tape down on bed with some stick glue or hairspray. If you use hairspray put it on thick. Rub it around carefully with a large putting spatula and then let it dry completely.
If you use blue tape and have too high of a temperature. The glue on the tape makes the tape wet looking and can cause the print not to stick.
Also the regular yellow tape is way better than blue tape anyway. I use it and the stick blue or hairspray and it works well.
As pointed out by others blue tape will peal up at high temperatures. If you do alot of abs and pla prints and you don’t want to go back and forth between blue tape and Capton you should buy some BuildTak tape. I speak from experience this tape works wonders for abs and pla.
Now, this isn’t 100% helpful for your immediate situation, but let me give you some endgame advice:
Ditch the kapton and painter’s tape, get a 6mm (1/4") borosilicate glass bed to put on top of the aluminium heat spreader plate. That’s what I did, and everything is glorious. Just some purple Elmer’s gluestick and everything sticks. I haven’t used rafts at all since. (For parts with very low surface contact area, I can get away with just adding a 1-layer skirt to keep them stuck down.)
Guys just use this, instead buying all these stuff. Trust me it works,i have been using for almost a year now and it just works no lifting/curling at all.
https://www.buildtak.com/
BuildTak is nice and all, but my slab of 6mm borosilicate glass only cost twice what a single sheet of BuildTak does and a good thick piece of glass offers additional benefits:
- Gives the bottom surfaces of parts a super-smooth finish.
- Provides a dead-flat surface, corner to corner, whereas BuildTak and other sheet-based surfaces are only as flat and level as the substrate you attach them to.
- Acts as a thermal mass, smoothing the rise and fall of the bed temp as well as further spreading the heat, helping to eliminate hot-spots.
It’s also practically indestructible. I remove my prints-- as well as clean up gluestick residue --with a razorblade scraper, and after a year and a half of constant usage there isn’t so much as a scratch!
You can chip borosilicate glass. i know because I chipped the surface of 3 of them before switching to an aluminum plate with sanded surface.
But I also don’t love build tack. It’s got good hold, but lousy release. So far I prefer hair spray directly on my metal build plate.
Yeah, I’ve heard-tell and seen pictures… (Including PET just taking huge chunks of glass with it when parts are removed!!) But considering everything I’ve put it through-- like literally scraping all the glue residue clean with a razor blade after every several prints, and printing PLA, ABS, Nylon, TPU, TPE, PCL, PVA, PC, and even PETG on it --for a year and a half without so much as getting a scratch, it makes me wonder if the people having these problems maybe got ripped off and got low-quality borosilicate glass, or possibly something else altogether. Or maybe it’s a matter of thickness. A lot of the examples I’ve seen of damage have been with what looks like 3mm (1/8") thick pieces of glass, and a 6mm piece like what I have is far more substantial.
The metal build plate is good too, if it’s well-made and flat… Mine wasn’t, for example; It dipped in the center. (But they’re also going to undergo far more thermal expansion than even non-borosilicate glass.)
