Raft Taking Away From Total Object Height

[QuasarQuon 0]

I'm fairly new to 3D printing so any help would be great. I'm printing with ABS, and using a heated metal build plate along with a perforated board. Because I'm using a perforated board I'm going to print with a raft, but I can't seem to get it quite right. Whenever I add a raft in the print settings the layers of the raft take away from the total height of the object, which for me is a problem because i need the print to be as accurate as possible. I've looked around and can't seem to get any kind of answer. Thanks in advance

[SandervG 1,521]

Hi, do you mean for example when you print a 10mm cube with a raft, it is only 9mm after removing the raft?

It should be printed in 11mm, and after removing the raft it should be 10.

Some pictures could probably help

Thanks!

[IRobertI 520]

It would also be good to know which version of cura you're using.

[QuasarQuon 0]

Hi, do you mean for example when you print a 10mm cube with a raft, it is only 9mm after removing the raft?

It should be printed in 11mm, and after removing the raft it should be 10.

Some pictures could probably help

Thanks!

 

Yep, that's exactly it. Here are some pictures.

So the cube is 20mm and at .1mm layers this makes it 200 layers. I have my bottom and top thickness set to .2mm which makes them the first and last two layers. When I don't have a raft enabled it works out just fine, you can see the top (last two) layers are solid.

So here I have the raft enabled and the raft is a total of .3mm making it 3 layers in this case. You can see the actual cube starts printing on layer 4.

This is the last layer of the print (200). As you can see the 3 layers of the raft have taken away from the top 3 layers of the cube and not just added 3 underneath resulting in the cube being unfinished. Do I just have to make the cube into a rectangle? I feel like that would be the wrong way to go about this, because what if you have some awkward shape that you can't just vertically extend?

If it helps, this is what I'm trying to print. And any help in terms of what setting to use that would be best to print would be awesome too. Thanks!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BydxCTJ7iX8WRVBaNzdxSTVteGc/view?usp=sharing

[QuasarQuon 0]

It would also be good to know which version of cura you're using.

 

I'm using 15.04.2

[SandervG 1,521]

@Nallath, we may need your superpowers here

Could it just be a wrong visual representation?

[nallath 1,120]

The raft is a bit weird with respect to the layer numbers; It uses -3, -2 and -1 as the layer rafts. It could be that Cura does not display them correctly (eg; It should state that there are in fact 203 layers).

Try to load the g-code in another g-code viewer and see if the problem is there (or just print it and see what happens )