Premium ASA with Excellent Print Performance
I’ve always been a huge fan of Atomic Filament and am happy to see this ASA offering added to the catalogue of filament materials. Like Atomic’s other filaments, this ASA prints well when the (sort of picky) prerequisite conditions are met and it is consistent across the two colors I have used, Black and Cool Gray. I’m currently printing this with a Prusa MK4 and used it to print a new set of parts for a second MK4. Most of my use is for printing functional parts that need heat resistance or UV resistance, and my observations will mostly reflect that use case.
To get this printing well with any useful bed adhesion and part strength, an enclosure was absolutely mandatory in my experience. This ASA was very picky about chamber temperature and liked a minimum chamber temperature of 45C. Bed temperature for me was best at 115C, as any higher caused elephant’s foot and any lower resulted in poor bed adhesion without an adhesion agent on the bed. I set the nozzle to 260C and used a 0.4 CHT nozzle for most of my prints. Despite being a bit picky to dial in, once it was printing, the results were very good. For some reason, this ASA likes more fan than I am used to, with up to 50% being needed to properly cool overhanging corners. This is most likely due to the high chamber temperatures reducing cooling fan effectiveness. For most of the print, I leave the fan at 20%.
Layer to layer consistency is excellent and the semi-matte finish really helps the aesthetics of parts. While all ASA has this nice finish, the Atomic ASA tends to really stand out here due to the very consistent layer lines adding to the already nice looks of ASA. In general, this ASA is slightly more glossy than other ASA I have used, but still far more matte than something like PLA.
On the technical side, the excellent performance is well worth the added pickiness of print parameters. With the CHT nozzle, 26 mm^3 /s of flow rate was easily achievable with no real degradation in part strength or quality. Heat resistance is significantly better than other ASA’s I have used with my fan duct holding up without warping after ~100 hours of ASA printing despite other ASA’s drooping and warping after about a dozen hours of print time. While the filament is picky about chamber temp, once it was above 45C, bed adhesion was quite good. Most of my parts need no brim and none have needed an adhesion agent when using the Prusa Satin build sheet. Layer adhesion is good with results mostly in line with other ASA’s in that layer adhesion is mostly determined by the chamber temperature. With my enclosure at around 50C, the adhesion is acceptable, but for me, more thought must be put into designs than with PETG parts since the parts are significantly weaker layer to layer when printed in air below 60C-70C. Shrinkage of this filament is very consistent with XY scaling to 100.5% results in parts with 0.1mm accuracy in most dimensions.
The black is a nice deep black while the cool gray is a slightly blue-toned gray that makes for a good neutral color. I will be printing the graphite gray as well when it arrives. I would like to see some more muted colors in this line as the semi-matte surface does great with light or dark grayed out colors and keeps parts looking professional. I would love to see a color palette similar to the colors currently being used for the PETG-CF line that Atomic makes.
Overall, I highly recommend this IF you have a well-insulated enclosure than can reach 45C before pressing print. Otherwise you are really missing out on the good bed adhesion and excellent part accuracy/strength. If you don’t enclose your printer, it is hard to recommend any ASA or ABS and I would instead highly recommend the PETG or PETG-CF that Atomic makes depending on the required stiffness that your parts need.
