What support materials have you used? In a moment of insanity, I started wondering if a paste extruder with washable glue in it would actually work. I know I have placed washable glove on top of spots where the filament did not behave and left a hole. The glue (just like on the heated bed) gave it enough of something to grip to print the infill on top of that spot. I have also wondered about squirting dough or a starch mixture. Maybe even making packing peanut infill.
Currently experimenting with HIPS. Doesn’t adhere as well to the bed as abs but prints well enough once temp and flow are dialled in.
I wonder if an additive could also be used to weaken abs/pla in order to make it easier to remove.
I have a suspicion one of the tricks they use with the UP! printer’s snap away supports system is to actively cool the interface layer while printing very slowly so the layers of the part that are subsequently deposited on top, bond poorly to the interface. Not sure if spiking abs or pla is necessary given it appears it’s just a matter of good slicer settings, support material in all the open source slicers is still immature compared to commercial versions ime.
@Tim_Rastall the Up! has a manual door for cooking. That’s not it.
The extruder sounds like it is doing 2 steps forward then 1 back on the last layer of the support. Honestly, not sure how it does it, it’s all closed source and without using an oscilloscope on the stepper I doubt I’ll find out.
The closest to the up I have done is on my hacked Felix 2 (dual Bowden extruder), I run one hot end really cold, just enough for it to not strip the filament, and have the steps per length about 20% less than true, the other extruder as needed.
If you are wondering if this is what the up! Does, no, it’s not, all layers and rafts are identical temp.
What if you used 2 extruder, both at ABS, but the sport being under extruded at lower temps, making it more brittle, and reducing adhesion?
@NathanielStenzel HIPS and ABS are very similar in a sense that ABS is a block copolymer of acrylonitrile, butadiene, and styrene. HIPS is obviously just styrene. The ratios of the ABS constituents can be changed depending on your desired properties. This is done in the polymer reactor. So in a way HIPS is a “weakened” version of ABS. The reason it’s easy to remove from ABS is that it only has one of the three functional groups that ABS does. In very lay terms it results in 1/3 the interface bonding strength.