Am I too ambitious?

[REMAP 1]

First off, I'm totally new to 3D printing, and this is the model I've designed to print on my UM2 with Cura 15.06.03.

I made the 3D model in TurboCad V21 and converted the STL with Cura. The printed model is truly awful.

I've attached screenshots of the model in TCAD, as seen in the Cura view, and a photo of the printout.

Am I being too ambitious to try creating this model?

[jameshs 42]

I think that is a bit over ambitious!

This about the width of your nozzle and then the width of apiece of text and you are right at or over the margins.

A few options - scale the whole thing up in Cura - to more or less the width of the buildplate - then the letters are a reasonable size.

The one I would do would be to generate a letters in the CAD programme at different sizes and print that - to see what size is the most successful.

I think I would not use the varying height of extrusion to begin with.

to make it easy you could use numbers that reflect the letter height - eg

10

12

14

16

which are actually the heights - and then is is really easy to work out which height is working the best.

Then think abut sans serriffed (eg aerial) - (the twirly bits) as the serrifs are very small and demand a change in direction for the printer.

Then set your speed slow (30 or less) and your temp to the lowest possible 208? and see what happens.

You will discover that you have to approach this king of thing gently to find out what the capabilities are, and the one you have started with is very small!

sneak up on it

James

[neotko 1,417]

You might need to playbwith the nozzle size and compensate the flow to make cura paint the small letters. I do that on s3d. Also if you are going to use stuff that needs more detail you might need to change to olsson block + 0.25 nozzle to create thinner details.

[REMAP 1]

Thanks for your suggestions - I'll try experimenting.

[DidierKlein 729]

And in Cura watch the Layer view it will show you what will go wrong or not.

The stock nozzle can print 0.4mm walls less it will not work (unless you change the settings in cura, it can work to some extend).

[jonnybischof 60]

Another thought on the model:

Consider making the relief text only one or two layers thick (for example: Make the letters protrude only 0.2mm).

It might look better.

I'd definitely switch to a very small nozzle, like neotko mentioned. www.3dsolex.com

Edited August 14, 2015 by Guest

[Tobus 6]

I run across issues like this on a regular basis, as I'm trying to produce scaled parts where I have no choice on the width. The under-extrusion in your lettering could be fixed by slowing down the print speed and disabling retraction. You might have more to clean up afterwards without retraction on, but it should extrude better.

[neotko 1,417]

I think his imsge it's the clasic 'braille' that slicers do with text or very small details where the nozzle size and the part don't mix. Making the stuff thicker will help. Also playing with the nozzle size to 1.2 more or less its doable to simulate a smaller/bigger nozzle

Edit: I mean this on simplify3d:

https://ultimaker.com/en/community/view/16881-really-tiny-little-details-with-04-nozzle-s3d-umo-

Or in cura doing this:

http://support.3dverkstan.se/article/30-getting-better-prints#solid-layer-fill

Edited August 14, 2015 by Guest

[cloakfiend 994]

i would not be trying to print a serif font that small, stay clear of times new roman and trajan pro.  You are far better off with a sans-serif font like DIN or something, choose a weight that's appropriate, serifs go to very fine points and at that scale it wont look right ever, you will always be missing the tips, or they will be deformed or straight when they should be slightly curved.

Edited August 18, 2015 by Guest

[tommyph1208 55]

+1 on the fonts

Use something simpler and maybe use bold and ALL CAPS... I think your end result will be much better and your message will still shine through