MakerGear Forum

I work almost across the street from the MakerBot store in CT and after an entire week with my M2 I was starting to think about trying some ABS. I asked a salesperson if they had anything printed with ABS and he told me they stock both ABS and PLA for sale, but they are only demoing PLA. I told him I was curious to try ABS and he told me to wait a second while checked on something in the back. He came out with an opened but unused spool of white ABS and told me that a customer had bought it by mistake and returned it, and they couldn't restock it, so the manager said to just give it to the first person who asked about ABS - so I got lucky!

I've been printing relatively small stuff in PLA on the bare glass heated to 70C. What are my chances of successful not too big prints in ABS with just the glass bed set to 100C?

Small parts: probably pretty high probability of success depending on your glass cleanliness. Probability approaches 1 with Kapton tape, glue stick or ABS glue. As the parts get larger and taller, that starts to drop off rapidly: even if you keep it on the bed you will start seeing layer separation. If you are designing your own part, you can mitigate this by avoiding long straight runs of filament. There was a good thread in the google groups that was pretty old started by Gary where someone designed a box with fluted walls that printed well. If you want to print large boxy things, you will need to enclose your build area.