PC brim adhesion overlap?

[PingInTheNorth 0]

 

Good morning, 

 

This is a functional print that I need a bunch of (see screenshot). Due to the environment that they will be exposed to, they need to be made of PC according to our in house testing.

 

Background out of the way, I was wondering if anyone has had much experience printing with PC and could give me some advice. We have printed a couple MTOs to dial in the tolerances and had some mild lift-up at the corners. My question is has anyone tried overlapping the brim so you can fit more parts on the build plate? Any thoughts?

 

Thank you, 

 

[geert_2 557]

What you can always do is design all brim (and all other support features) in your CAD design. And switch off any automatically generated brim or support in Cura. Then you have full control over the shape and you can optimise it to your specific needs. For example, sometimes more than one layer of brim might be desirable to prevent the object from coming off the glass, especially if the brim is too flexible and when printing at low layer heights and 100% infill. Or you might want to connect all brim parts into one big plate covering the whole glass for more stability. Or you might want to add reinforcements into the brim, so it is a sort of combined brim-and-support, for example when printing lantern poles (similar to injection moulded bosses).

 

This is what I do here: in some areas I need no brim at all, and no support. In some areas I do, and it needs to have special shapes to make later removal possible. So I designed them into the CAD file. The pink and orange things are supports. The cube is a dummy "cooling tower", otherwise the yellow model cannot be printed correctly (its top melts; this is a tiny keychain).

 

 

I have no experience with PC though, so I can't advise on that.