Avoiding Google Search Engine

[KevinMakes 22]

So the name of this part is being obscured because well its proprietary and I don't want anyone searching this type of object to find this thread....but there's cool things going on here and I have to share it.

A bit of back story then the stats then the pictures:

We knew that the objects z resolution wasn't that important to us, if the layers bonded and didn't look super ugly then it would work, we also knew that a 10 hour print time would not fly. So to speed the process up I made a bigger (1.6 mm) nozzle and then got our machine working with dual extrusion for any prints that needed to be wider than 2.9 (the threshold that I wanted for overlap to extrude slowly with high bondage between layers for more strength)

Then came the issue of getting a good tool path, we tried a horizontal based with high infill and that was taking far too long so I changed the orientation of the part and was able to cut about an hour with just getting rid of the support material.

Then came the rectilinear tool path, I knew that the traditional cross hatch per layer would not work because the zig zag would take much more time and drastically increase wear on the machine, and 2 left to right passes was just all-around much more logical than 500 front to back...this will make sense with the picture.

Then placing the start of each tool path closest to 500x 0y cleaned up the print due to bad transitions and allowed me to stop using retraction (currently using retraction still for cleaner edges.

Lastly, this object was printed ridiculously fast (in 22 and a half minutes) The volume of the part is with a total filament length of 5963.3 mm. Ill let you do the math because I came up with 3 different results 3 different times and if I get it wrong I dont want teh interwebs's know-it-alls to murder my face. If anyone wants to comment teh maths then please do.

Stats

PLA, 1.6 mm nozzle, Ultimaker 2, .4 layer height, 1 outline/shell w/ 0% infill, part is: 1.95 mm thick (global) approx 175 long x 78 high (wide) and various heat settings as well as fan settings were used based on the layer #

Edited September 25, 2015 by Guest

[gr5 2,167]

very cool. No pictures? :(

[KevinMakes 22]

Had a few up earlier... had to take it down once we release the product I can post pictures for you guys again. Sorry. There's two companies that we compete with... that have a bunch of investors... who are going to be very mad once I give teh pres. teh go ahead to publicize the fact that we can print them 4 times as fast. The ad camp. comes out in 2 weeks so I would say I could safely post it in a few weeks without fear of the proprietary build methods betting used by them first. Sorry I should have just waited til then.