several piece together ?

[Catlord 17]

Hi,

here's a question: when you have to print several pieces, how do you do ?

Do you choose to print one piece, then another, then another or do you print everything together ?

Why do you choose one option rather the other one ?

In case you choose to print the pieces one after another, do you have to check yourself if the printhead will bump into the other peices  or does Cura do the job itself ?

thanks in advance.

Cedric

[stu_le_brew 42]

no need to worry Cura will take care of any possible collisions, also if there are very tall items it will change to print all pieces at once so preventing the head crashing into your work. You can see the path the head is going to take by looking at Layers (in view mode - top right of Cura window)

Also it is often helpful if people know where you are in the world and which printer you have, this could mean a different answer for your problem, so I suggest you update your profile with this info

Welcome to the forum

[SandervG 1,521]

Good question

It kinda depends on different factors.

It is usually not a good idea to completely fill up every inch of the buildplate with small models. At the border/corners there is a chance they won't stick to the bed properly.

But if you have only a few (bigger) models I would recommend to cut it up in 2 or 3 batches.

If you print multiple models at the same time they have more time to cool down, which benefits your surface finish. On the other hand by dividing your project up in a few batches, if, god forbid, something might interferes with your print (like your filament gets tangled up), you don't loose that much, both time and material wise.

I can imagine using 'print one at a time' when you don't want to wait for the entire project to be finished to take out your first sample.

Or if you have a lot of smaller prints, print one at a time may be better.

For example, if we need to fill up our stock of Ulti-bots in the office we print batches of 16 robots at the same time and we use print one at a time. Otherwise it would travel too much, wouldn't make sense.

Also, you want to finetune your settings so you don't have any stringing. Stringing may leave oddities on your surface, which undermine the advantage 'printing all at once' offers.

Cura will calculate for you where the models should be positioned so the fan shroud won't knock them over. You can still reposition them and it will correct itself if you try to put them to close together.

[LePaul 331]

I've had good luck printing two objects at a time and was tempted to do more....but the margin of error is always there, should something go wrong, you've wasted a lot of material.

Can it be done? Yes.

Should you? With great caution