Confirmed: Monoprice ABS filament dissolves in acetone.
Great for support structure in a dual-head printer!
@John_Bump Support material for what? You would have a difficult time using ABS as support for PLA. Usually when ABS is used it is the model material and HIPS is the support material. Both dissolve in acetone regardless of vendor but HIPS dissolves in limonene whereas ABS does not. HIPS also makes a good breakaway support material when the model does not have fine details connected to it, or deep cavities.
Why problems with using ABS as support for PLA?
Because ABS generally requires that the print surface be hot enough to cause PLA to soften, sag, and possibly flow out. Even if you did get ABS to stick to a surface suitable for printing PLA you would likely have problems with it warping/curling. Lastly it would in a sense be wasteful to use ABS as PLA support. You would be better off printing the model in ABS, unless you have some sort of chemical/solvent resistance requirement.
I agree that hips+abs is a better support solution then abs+ pla, but it has.been done before.
@nop_head experimented with ABS and PLA in acetone: http://hydraraptor.blogspot.com/2012/04/more-trifurcated-pla.html - it does not seem very encouraging.
I’ve dunked our PLA directly into acetone - while the PLA did not dissolve away (which the accompanying ABS did), I could tell that the PLA was affected to some extent – it had a less smooth finish afterwards.
As he pointed out, PLA as support to dissolve in alkali is the way to go (and apparently what Stratasys does).
I wasn’t posting this because I am suggesting to use this for a support material, but some people were saying they had doubts that the Monoprice ABS was real, they said some people tried to dissolve it in acetate and it didn’t react.
@Joseph_Chiu Stratasys uses HIPS for ABS support which does dissolve in an alkali.
@Nuker_Bot_NukerBot_3 I didn’t necessarily think you were, just replying to other comments. Actually, without context my reaction to your post was rather unexcited, but now that you’ve given it context I understand and find it interesting.
HIPS melts in Alkali? Interesting. I’ve been hearing from several places for a while that it was PLA. Where did you hear that it’s HIPS? Would love to investigate!
HIPS dissolves in limonene.
Even better, with HIPS + ABS, the two bonds well enough for supports to work, but often will separate with force without leaving much scars. You can easily break off most of the supports, and then dissolve the remaining or inaccessible bits.
@Nuker_Bot_NukerBot_3 were they really talking about acetate and not about acetone?
Acetate != Acetone
lol my bad