


I first purchased ABS filament in 2018 exploring filament types and just could not get decent prints from the spool with my open frame printers of the period. I considered binning it at the time but vacuum packed and kept it on the rack to try again in the future.
Soon after purchasing my first enclosed printer late in 2023 I tried the ABS again and was amazed that it suddenly printed without issues. A few factors contributed to the success of printing the ABS:
Printers improved a lot in the timeframe. Recently I ran into major issues with rapid PETG and just couldn't get it to print decently, everything was just bad, blobs and ugly walls and I suspected everything but the filament until I eventually tried my regular trusted PETG stock. After tuning everything to levels never before tuned I repeated that with my ABS stock and was blown away by its performance.
I purchased a bunch of Sunlu ABS when on promotion recently and what amazing prints they yield. I pushed volumetric flow just to see where I can take it and was absolutely surprised to see no degradation pushing it over 25mm^3/s. I have not been able to push any other filament this far on my setup. ABS doesn't warp in my dishwasher, I make knife handles from it, create custom Consul or Mason jar lids and everything can be washed as normal in a dishwasher without warping during the process.

So why is ABS market share dropping and why is everyone not using ABS over PETG. It's Marginally more expensive and orders of magnitude better for any engineering or functional applications. I am stumped and wondering why this is the case? Please share your insights with me.
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