Saving Money with Supports

[BairdB 1]

Hello, so I have an idea to save the amount of PVA that is used to print supports without compromising any quality! Last time I checked, PVA is significantly cheaper than a main material like PLA. What if you printed only the bottom and top of the support column in PVA, and print the tall, wasteful part in PLA. I this way, you can through the print in a bucket of water, and the PLA column of support will break free from the part after the PVA on the top and bottom of the part dissolve away. Does anyone know how to do something like that, I would imagine that you would need to manipulate the way that Cura slices supports which sounds very hard to do.

Does this make sense? I you have any questions you can reach me at bairdbankovic@gmail.com

[IRobertI 521]

This feature is already in cura through the following settings:

.
Support infill extruder
Support interface extruder
 Support roof extruder
 Support floor extruder

Obviously it will not work on prints where the support material gets trapped inside the model if it can't be dissolved.

Edited July 21, 2017 by Guest

[Tomhe 21]

It's not as easy as just selecting the PLA extruder as 'Support infill extruder' (unfortunately). You have to change a few more settings for it to work nicely:

With these settings it should work similar to how PVA-only supports work. It won't work with every model, because the support infill structure is really strong and will often be locked inside/around the model. So watch the layer view before deciding to print with these settings . Use the 'Support Horizontal Expansion' and 'Support Join Distance' settings to change the shape of the supports.

Edited July 21, 2017 by Guest