SA Filament ABS Filament - 1.75mm 1kg Grey

Among the many different polymers and blends that Makers like to use, two 3D Filament types stand out as firm favourites, PLA and ABS. While PLA is widely popular due to its easy printing style and vibrant colours, ABS filament definitely comes in at a close second place due to its impressive mechanical capabilities. If you want long-lasting functionality, printing in ABS is the way to go. SA Filament’s ABS is locally made as a blend to give you the strength you need for tougher prints while supporting local.

These 1kg spools of SA Filament ABS Filament are part of a range of vibrant colours for your projects and are made right here in South Africa. ABS is known for its high strength and resistance to mechanical forces. Protect your electronics with an ABS casing or finally print a custom part for your car that you know will hold up. This filament has so much functional potential. SA Filament’s ABS may not have the reputation of our other favourite brands, but their blend is cleanly spooled and gives us the option of a lekker local brand to support. Another benefit of ABS is its resistance to general scratches and bruises from dropping your models. If you want a decoration piece to stay pristine and survive a knock to the floor, print is in ABS. While ABS may be more difficult to print with than PLA, the benefits of ABS can certainly outweigh the extra time and effort required. If you’re willing to take the time to learn the subtle tricks and nuances that make ABS trickier than usual, you certainly won’t be disappointed.

While there are a lot of different colours to choose from in 3D Printing, grey has always been one of our favourites due to its neutral nature and ability to fit almost any print or model you can imagine. In addition to just looking damn good, grey filaments are fantastic bases for painting your models any colours you want. This makes it a solid choice for miniature printing or decorations, which you want to paint yourself. Grey ABS Filament is just as good for practical prints that you simply want to blend in with various environments. So, whether you’re planning on printing brackets for motors, cable runners for behind the TV cabinet, SA Filament Grey ABS is a great choice for both aesthetic and functional prints.

Helpful Tips for Printing with SA Filament ABS Filament:

As many experienced 3D Makers will know, ABS Filament is often regarded as the “higher-grade” filament when compared to PLA, as it is substantially stronger and more durable than PLA, but can also be quite a lot more difficult to print with. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s impossible to print with, and once you’ve got your settings dialled in just right, it can be just as easy as any other filament. It simply requires more practice and patience to get right, and of course because of the higher temperatures required, it’s often recommended to get an enclosure of some kind to prevent the plastic from cooling too rapidly.

With this in mind, and to make your life as a 3D Maker a lot easier than if you were just going in blind, we’ve taken all of our knowledge and experience with this polymer and refined it down to three simple tips, which should help you get off to a running start, or at least assist in getting your settings sorted, from which point you can perfect your settings according to your particular setup:

• ABS Printing Tips – Controlled Printing Environment: Although we all want to print parts that are both easy to produce and highly durable in real-world applications, we often can’t have the best of both worlds, and ABS is a prime example of that – offering high levels of durability and resistance, but requiring stricter and arguably more difficult printing parameters. This is why we always recommend a good quality enclosure for your 3D Printer for printing ABS, as this will give you an even better control over these parameters, and will help prevent uncontrollable external forces from affecting the print while it’s being produced. With that said, some of the extra parameters that are important to keep in mind is that you want to keep the filament nice and toasty, without cooling them down too quickly. This will prevent differential cooling of the part, which in turn would cause warping as some parts cool faster than others, and will help to ensure strong adhesion between layers, leading to a great print that doesn’t layer-separate or present weaknesses in various parts of the print.
• ABS Printing Tips – Benchmarks Save Time & Troubles: As you can probably tell by now, printing with ABS is quite a bit trickier than many of the other popular filaments we stock, and this is why we will always recommend “dialling in” your 3D Printer with calibration or benchmarking prints. And while some may argue that calibration prints are a waste of filament, we’ve actually found the opposite to be true, as calibration prints typically use minimal amounts of filament while greatly assisting with rapidly calibrating the printer for a higher level of quality. This can save you substantial amounts of wasted filament from failed prints while only using a small amount of filament to get it all calibrated, resulting in saved time, saved money and (most importantly) saved filament to use for your next exciting project!
• ABS Printing Tips – Tiny Adjustments can make a Big Difference: Finally, we often see beginners go through the common problem of overshooting their changes and modifications to settings, and instead of making tiny changes on at a time, they tend to try a few different changes, only to suddenly face an entirely new problem altogether. And this is why we always recommend making very small changes, and preferably only one at a time. This way, you can know precisely what is helping, what might be hindering, and how to better fine-tune settings in the future. Conversely, if you make a lot of different changes all at once, even if it fixes the problem you were having, you may never know which of those changes helped or hindered, or how they affected the overall quality. As such, small changes help you pinpoint problems with precision, ensuring that if you ever face that problem again, you will know exactly which settings to tweak and how much to tweak them by to get your print quality back to the level that you’re happy with.

Fortunately, although ABS is more difficult to print with than many other options, with the above three tips, you already have a great place to start from, and of course you should never be scared to do further research too. Additionally, consider getting involved in discussions and asking questions in online communities. You may be surprised at just how helpful and friendly the SA 3D Maker community can be, and there are always great people eager to help others, often just waiting for an opportunity to do so.

Additional Resources for 3D Printing with ABS:

After being so involved in the industry of 3D Printing for many years now, we have to admit that we are still constantly learning, and that’s certainly not a bad thing at all, as it also allows us to constantly improve our skills and knowledge. This is why we will always recommend doing further research, forming your own opinions, and sharing opinions with others so as to learn from each other and grow the global knowledge that is shared on a multitude of different forums and online communities. And with this in mind, we’d like to share some of the best and most valuable resources that we’ve found so far, which are all meant to help you improve your 3D Printing skills, with a particular focus on 3D Printing with ABS Filaments:

• To kick off these awesome guides, we’re going to start by sharing this fantastic Simplify3D ABS Printing Guide, since Simplify3D have become quite famous for not only their involvement in 3D Printing, but also their specialised slicing software that many 3D Makers absolutely love. It helps with tips on controlling potential warping, assistance with setting up and using brims and rafts for extra support and stability, as well as some handy health and safety insights to keep you safe while enjoying your ABS Printing.
• The next awesome guide is a General ABS Tips & Tricks Guide from Tractus3D, which gives a good rundown of what the filament is often used for, what you can do to improve your print quality, as well as some tips on troubleshooting when you experience specific types of problems.
• Once you have your 3D Printer producing relatively good quality prints, the next step is to start fiddling with fine settings and slight adjustments, at which point this All3DP ABS Print Refinements Guide is the ideal next step to improving overall quality. It caters to all of the common problems like warping, bed adhesion and stringing, but also goes into slicing settings and more advanced tips too, so be sure to check it out.

Finally, because the Creality Ender 3 has become such an incredibly popular 3D Printer throughout 3D Maker communities all over the world, we feel that this awesome Creality Ender 3 ABS Printing Guide is an excellent addition to the above resources. Bear in mind, however, that the final printing tip is to get an enclosure, but don’t feel pressured to buy an expensive enclosure, and consider doing some research yourself into how you can make a very affordable makeshift enclosure by using simple tools like “Grow Tents”, squared acrylic sheets, or even an unused cupboard or shelf.

As Makers, we often can't help but try to fix the problems we see, whether it be at home, in our local environments, or pretty much anywhere else that we can reach, and this is essentially what has driven the SA Filament team to bring locally produced filaments to the South African Market. After experiencing one of the roughest and most challenging years that South Africans have faced in recent times, the team at SA Filament started seeing a severe shortage of filaments throughout the country, and although many local 3D Makers wanted to get involved in assisting with 3D Printed face masks and other PPE, there simply wasn't enough filament to go around for everyone. So, with a relatively simple idea driven by a passion for the SA 3D Maker community, the SA Filament team decided to take on the challenge and open up a manufacturing plant to begin extruding filaments locally - so that supplies could be not only available to as many South Africans as possible, but also as affordable as possible for everyone who wants to get involved in 3D Printing.

As 3D Makers who are passionate about not only their SA community's wellbeing, but also for ensuring that all SA 3D Makers have open access to affordable yet good quality filament, SA Filament have been true Makers in the fact that they saw a problem, created a solution, and followed through until the task was completed. We look forward to working with them to help boost the local 3D Filament industry, and we're excited to see just how big they can grow as they utilise their strong passion to drive the brand forward and deliver a Local, Lekker Filament for all SA Makers.