Is standard 0.4mm nozzle suffiecient for jewelry prints?

[Ugnele 0]

I've been trying to print something similar to the picture but without any luck. I'm wondering if standard 0.4nozzle is enough? Or do I need to upgrade to to 0.25? I've seen aftermarket ones that has 0.1 or 0.15 nozzles, but the print cores for them are quite pricey, so I would really like to get some advices before making any purchase.

 

I'm using UM3 with PLA filament. 

 

According the picture items are printed with 25 micron resolution.

 

[SandervG 1,521]

Hi @Ugnele, welcome to our community! 

With a .4 mm nozzle you can print in a 20 micron resolution in Z (so up), but not in X and Y (left right, back forward). But this is will require some manual tweaking of your print profile so you may need to get some practice first.

For this you would need a .25mm nozzle. They are available on both Ultimaker 2+ and Ultimaker 3. However, with this smaller nozzle, it is not recommended to print at 20 micron in Z, because the amount you would be extruding would be so small, you would be borderline under-extruding constantly. 

 

@gr5 has 0.1mm nozzles I believe, but if you would be printing items of this delicacy always you may be better off with an SLA printer. Have you given this any consideration already?

 

[Ugnele 0]

Hi, thanks for such a quick reply.

 

I was recommended to UM3 and I made a purchase without further reading about SLA. Do you think it's not suitable for such items?

 

What is recommended Z resolution with 0.25?

 

 

[SandervG 1,521]

You can do a lot of wonderful things with an Ultimaker 3, don't get me wrong

But such models are very intricate. With 0.25mm I would suggest to start with 0.4mm and see how that works. First it is important to get some practice and get familiar with the technology.

 

What will you be trying to make? End use parts, prototypes, fit testing, molds? 

[Ugnele 0]

It was intended to be used for molds mostly.

 

I'm playing with it all day, but I can only get a decent prints for bigger items. Not sure if I should money on the nozzles..

 

As you mention SLA it seems most of the people use DLP or SLA for jewelry.

[SandervG 1,521]

SLA/DLP is similar but use a different projector. It is commonly used for jewelry yes.

We also have some user cases of jewelry though, perhaps they can be of inspiration for you. In the end, it really depends on what type of designs (level of intricacy) you will be making.

 

[gr5 2,181]

If you buy an AA .25 from ultimaker and later decide to go smaller then you would have saved a lot of money by going for the hardcore as it's cheaper than buying two UM cores and you can change nozzles.

 

If I were making jewelry that small (rings versus pendants) I would have gone with a resin printer (sla or dlp).  I do indeed sell 0.1 and 0.15 nozzles.  You can cheat a bit - tell Cura to do a 0.3mm line with even though you have a 0.4mm nozzle.  It works pretty well.  At some point it looks like crap as you keep lying about the nozzle size.  So similarly you can certainly print line widths of 0.2mm with a 0.25mm nozzle.

 

But you can't go down forever.  I've printed some amazingly small stuff.  For FDM or FFF printing (where you melt plastic and squeeze it out a nozzle) you can only go so far and your UM printers can do it as well as any FDM printer if you go smaller nozzles.  But the resin printers take it to a whole new level of detail.  Especially the DLP ones which can "zoom" to ever finer resolutions.

 

You could also consider using your UM to do 2X scale practice models and then use 3dhubs or shapeways to build the actual final product.