yellowshark

Hi I know some of you use Meshmixer so I thought I would post this here. I want to generate supports for a piece I am struggling with. I downloaded from the Autodesk site; it does not say vs 2 it says vs 9001. I can see it has at least one difference to the version used by Illuminarti in his Extrudable.me posting dated 13 Dec. 2013. Do I have the right version? I have found the support tool but I need to turn my piece upside down for printing and I think I need to do this before using the support tool. But I cannot find a tool in Meshmixer for rotating, normally for me around the X or Y axis. Can you point me in the right direction?

LOL best print I have seen in months A good job you do not have a dual head otherwise you might have been tempted to print a white bikini at the same time.

Hi Tom, lots of great points Nicolinux. I will just add that this technology is not plug and play and if you want to get consistently great prints then you have to put effort in. It is a learning process with highs and lows. Take the time to try various combinations of the major parameters noted above. If you can afford it, buy decent filament. If you are in Europe, Colourfabb and Faberdashery supply good quality filament (there will be others). One thing I had never considered before I started was how do you orient your model for getting the best printing results? At the simple end, if you are going to print a cylinder, do you lay it flat or print it vertically? There are pros and cons. Do you print it as one piece or several pieces then glued together. If you do your own design then design for the way the printer works. Eg. if you build a house, how thick do you design your house walls? The printer has a 0.4mm nozzles so make your house wall thickness a multiple of 0.4mm and select the number of walls/perimeters needed. If you are struggling to get clean right angled corners, try designing with chamfers.

Hi guys, this is a great thread which I have been following avidly. This is certainly not at the hub of the matter and I do not want to teach anyone to suck eggs but also do not forget that any different filament from the same supplier may well need different settings. Today I tried Faberdashery’s Pearly white PLA for the first time. I set up with my standard test settings which are 300 microns at 60 m/s and 210 degrees. This is what I use for most of my Faberdashery filaments in test mode, including their Arctic white. What a mess, major under extrusion. After several attempts I loaded my benchmark Colourfabb Dutch orange to make sure there was nothing wrong with the printer – that worked fine. In the end I had to run at 230 degrees to cope with temp. variation; dip a degree under 225/6 and it would under extrude. So two whites from the same reputable supplier and 20 degrees difference in temperature.

And also what was your extruder temp., bed temp., 1st layer thickness, 1st layer speed?

Hi Simon, many thanks for the info and your positive statements. I agree, I would rather pay money for this type software for the reasons you state. I suspect I may well take up your offer to ask a couple of questions! but I will have a breeze through the forum tonight as a first step. Pete

Hmn, no telno, postal or email address. No trial software available as far as I can see. No proper user manual it seems. Much as I would be happy to do so for something that gave me everything I wanted, do I really want to pay them 140 bucks???. This one is going to need some careful research!

Thanks for that. I will carve out some time to go through the website and documentation and let you know what I think

Interesting Simon; does it have any DECENT support for dual extruders? Do not know how long you have been using it, is it buggy or solid? My stuff is mainly engineering and architectural. The later is easy really but the engineering side, with circular slopes and overhangs (well actually I call then underhangs if they are going from the centre outwards), has and continue to cause me problems with a decent exterior finish on various parts. I tend to use slic3r, just trying RC2 at the moment.

"Also all you guys who talk about temperature and speed keep leaving out layer height. There's a huge difference between 50mm/sec at 220C with .2mm layer height versus .1mm layer height. In fact it's a 2X difference." Good point Gr5. My figures were based on running at 300 microns(210 at 80ms). In context the difference is not huge though; with 100 microns at 60 or40 m/s I run at 205. I could possibly take that down to 200 but have not tried. Unlike most people (I suspect) I always run the first layer temp at the same as the rest of the build (with PLA) to avoid any transients as the temp. changes and stabilises

Hmnn, I know (guess) that this will vary between material manufacturers/brands but your temperatures just seem too high to me. Most of the PLA specs I have seen from various people set the upper limit at 220 degrees. I use Faberdashery and Colourfabb products and at speeds up to 80m/s have not needed to go above 210 degrees. At 60m/s Colourfabb seems quite happy at 205 degrees (they test on Ultimakers) although I accept theirs is not pure PLA, being mixed with PHA. I do wonder if you are masking some other problem with extrusion by using such high temperatures?

Do not forget that you need to achieve a minimum layer print time so that the previous layer is dry before the next layer is printed. It is difficult to judge the model size from a photograph, but looking at your model, whether you print it vertically or horizontally, I suspect you may suffer from this. It can of course be controlled by overall print speed but you may need to achieve it by doubling up and printing two copies of the model concurrently, or using a simple hollow cylinder as he second model, which is at least as high (same number of layers or more) as your model. Personally I aim for a minimum of 6 seconds and feel more comfortable with 8-10 seconds with the material I use.

I suggest that you need to check your government’s/medical governing body’s regulations on this and probably find a filament with appropriate certification. For example 3Dprinting is used in the dental industry but that seems to be specialised and expensive stuff (the printers). If you go to a major manufacturer site like Stratysys you will probably find details on their medical product and maybe information on the type of material they use. For example Taulman t-glasse nylon filament, which can be used on our printers, has American FDA certification to be used with food containers. That is the only filament I have seen with certification – for coming into contact with food, not for inserting into some poor rabbit! If you search the Net you will find a variety of medical institutions working with 3Dprinting – that might help you find a way forward – but I am sure that anything usable will need to be certified.

This may or may not be the point, but you need a z-offset if you are using a printing tray (eg glass)

Yup PLA does shrink! I noticed this the other day. I printed a box, using colourFabb's PLA/PHA for the box and Faberdashery's PLA for the lid. On completion and fitting together, the lid had noticeably shrunk at the perimeter.

Hi lifti, my personal view is that this technology, whether it be Ultimaker or not, is not plug and play. You will get an enormous amount of help if you put in the time to go through the posts on this forum but you also need to put effort and time into printing yourself, getting your settings right and learning how to change your setup to cope with different geometries. Your experience will build as will your success rate. And if you can afford it, help yourself by buying the very best filaments which will help you achieve consistency.

I use extra strength hair spray on my glass which I have found to be very good for both PLA and PLA/PHA. Temp. set to 60 degrees as measured with a digital thermometer

Funny how we get different results. I have been doing a lot of work with Faberdashery PLA over the past few weeks, running mostly at 60 m/s and 210 degrees. On Saturday I opened up my first reel of Colorfabb (Dutch orange) PLA/PHA. Wow it was so much better. I ran the same speed/temp as the PLA. I did not suffer under extrusion on path start or oozing during retraction but, printing 4 copies of the same model simultaneously I was suffering some oozing during the travel from the last model back to the first model. Reducing the temperature to 205 fixed that. So I seem to be somewhat lower in temps. Of course a couple of print runs does not mean I have the optimum setting. Right now I do not think I will be going back to PLA.

I have been printing exclusively on glass and never had a problem. With PLA I heat the glass to 60c and apply two coats (20 secs in between) of extra strength hair spray to the print area. On completion I wait 5minutes or so for the glass temperature to lower and then I find I can easily remove the object from the glass with a thin “credit card”. If I try it straight away I cannot prise the object off the glass, or indeed if I leave it overnight which I did just the one time! Do not forget that your bed temperature is not your glass temperature. I run the bed at 70c which I find maintains a consistent 59-61 on the glass. Whether that changes with glass thickness I have no idea.

Thank you Simon, really really helpful, it is slotting into place now. And unsurprisingly astute too J. This past week I have been easing myself in with Cura but spent some hours today looking at the Slic3r software and reading the manual. I am about to spend 3-4 weeks testing and optimising the settings for the various materials I may use. So I have started to look at some of the advanced settings and also begun trying to get a feel for how Cura stacks up against some of the other slicers. I have another question resulting from one of your recommendations... “In practical terms, that means always printing at the same linear speed, and same extrusion width. “ One of the components I want to make is spur gears. The dimensions are fixed apart from the no. of teeth (and resultant diameters) and I have also made the inner weight saving holes smart and linked them to the inner diameter. It is important that the teeth are well defined so I was thinking of printing them at a slower speed than the body of the gear. So if I set the shell thickness to 0.8mm and reduce the print speed but increased the infill speed that I think would do it for me. Do you think for this application my approach in changing the speed would be valid? Cheers Pete

Hi all, so having got my new printer setup I am ready to do some serious printing. I have some confusion over perimeters and extrusion widths and how to produce solid parts. Hoping you guys and gals can help. Is the density of material laid down by setting the infill to 100% the same as the density of the perimeters? If not, how do I get a solid object, uniform throughout? Is the extrusion width the width of material laid down at 90 degrees to the extrusion path? I assume generally it is best to have the extrusion width equal to, or a multiple of, the nozzle diameter? I have read that giving the outer perimeters a thinner extruder width can give a better surface finish? If so, is the an optimum setting for this, e.g. 50% of nozzle diameter, or is it something else? I am printing parts, not figurines etc. so I need, for the most part to print solid objects. In that context “perimeters” does not mean anything to me. When I see the question how many perimeters do you want, that leaves me somewhat nonplussed, as I guess the answer is none! I just want it to print what I designed in my 3D model. If the depth of my spur gear is 1mm I want it to print it 1mm. If my design does not have a hollow middle then I expect the printer to make it solid. Should I put 1, or should I ensure my dimensions are multiples of the extrusion width and put, say, 50. (not always possible - spur gear being an example) How wide is a perimeter? Is it the extrusion width? Of course if 100% infill gives the same density then I suppose this is not actually problematical. I do note that that you can set different speeds for perimeter and infills and can see that that would be useful. Cheers Pete

Hi Markus, please excuse my inexperience. What does a "single outline" mean? What are "perimeter lines"? Cheers, Pete

As a newbie I am somewhat confused by this thread. I thought, from previous reading all over the place that PVA was de rigeur for PLA support. This thread is indicating that it is v difficlut to get and if you can get it it will screw up your extruder. So what do people use for PLA support? BTW bought some 3mm PVA from Plastic2Print yesterday before reading this threa!

In all the stuff I have read on how important it is to have a level print bed I have never seen the point as to what it should be level with. And I have never seen a design that lets you fit the standard 8mm HIFI speaker spiked legs to the printer to ensure the printer is absolutley level before worrying about the bed. Anyone do this?

Good results from Inventor 2014 so far,albeit not with any complex stuff and will be trialling Solidworks from next week. But of course inordinately expensive compared to other viable options.