ABS/raft almost single part

[Timber Haint]

If this has been answered before I'll take any links available as searching for this yielded a ton of results that were irrelevant.

When I print with Hatchbox ABS (the only kind of tried so far) and I use a raft, the raft is almost part of the print. What I mean by that is, it's almost impossible to get the raft off. It'll break off piece by piece leaving remnants that can only be sanded off if I don't want to destroy the print.

My first thought would be to increase the distance/space between the raft and the part.
A second guess would be that my ambient temperature or build plate temperature is too high causing the raft and the part to almost become one.

Suggestions or links?

[crimsonyoshi]

Have you tried decreasing the density infill of the raft?

[Timber Haint]

Thanks! That's a good idea. I'll give it a shot.

[crimsonyoshi]

Let me know if it works out for you. I found in my experimentation that a wider nozzle (and by extension more support / model contact) makes it harder to remove support material for the same reason as a dense raft. 0.4mm might be slow, and chew up print time (and electricity), but it's super easy to remove if you don't have 100% infill contact!

Word of caution though - you don't want to decrease the raft infill by insane amounts. Remember when printing your first model layer, the plastic needs to adhere to something, and with a lower density, you create a grid instead of a flat surface. if the grid boxes are small enough, you won't have material sag in-between the grid mesh. If you don't have super fine detail going on in your first layer, you could likely get away with 35-50% infill values (and tbh, experiment with it - don't take my numbers as gospel).

[zemlin]

You have complete control of raft adhesion. There's a setting for the separation between the build and the raft. Don't have IM in front of me, so can't give you the exact name. Increase that. I often start with that at 80% of the layer height and adjust from there to get the raft adhesion I want. The integrity of the bottom layer also decreases and you increase that distance, so the likelihood of pulling off some small bits of the bottom layer can increase as well.

[Timber Haint]

I've actually stopped using a raft for Hatchbox ABS. That stuff sticks SO well to the buildtak/glass that I decided to stop using a raft.

If I start seeing "elephant footing" then I might go back... I'll see.

As a side note, once I changed my first layer height (viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13369) the prints still stick nicely, but aren't near as hard to get off the build plate. I'm guessing the closeness of the first layer was causing it to "over-adhere".