I've had a makerbot cupcake for a little over 3 years now, and have printed quite a few parts for home and FRC use.
As stated above, closing the chamber helps significantly, especially as seasons change. If your printer is near a window or in a small office, the thermal gradients are pretty bad. I have a single sheet of paper taped over openings to keep the platform and extruder heat in. Especially in ABS, this reduces warping
I haven't used rafts in a long time, but support material is still useful on particularly hard prints. The type of support material and ease of removal depends highly on your model slicer.
For slicers, I ran Skeinforge in RepG for a long time, but now I use
slic3r. I've been meaning to try Cura. Both are capable of replicator and sailfish compatible gcode. The main things I like about slic3r are:
- Place and arrange multiple parts on the print bed
- way faster slicing than Skeinforge, even on my laptop from 2006
- separate profiles for slicing, filament, and printers
I have a profile for "Strong" which is 4 perimeters, and 40% infill (agree that going above 40% is rarely useful), "Normal" (3 perimeters, 20% infill) and "Fast" (2 perimeters, 10% infill).
Inputting your filament diameter is critical, and also your extruder steps per mm. without these you will get too much or too little plastic, which can be fatal on the field. You should be able to print a 100% solid cube and have it come out full and flat.
My latest upgrade has been a Raspberry Pi to run my printer - see my
blog post on this topic. I have since gotten the wifi configured and have a wireless printer. When I bring it to the school, I switch back to a wired connection.
For print setup, I use:
ABS: 220C extruder, 120C bed, lightly snaded Kapton tape (I have a 4" wide roll) with a layer of Aqua Net (hair spray) for difficult parts.
PLA: 180C extruder, 60C bed, Blue painters tape (3" roll, as above) again with Aqua Net for smaller parts.
If a part is being hard to remove, especially ABS, I just let the bed cool to room temperature, and it pops right off.
ABS parts that need more strength can be put in a warm acetone vapor bath for between 1-60 minutes depending on how much smoothing you want. This glues all the layers together. Let me know if you want to try this, and need more info.