Custom purge towers in Cura

[avionne 0]

So, purge towers. They love to break. Every time I've done a tall print, the tower always fails, making the part extremely ugly and introducing a looooot of post processing time. I have tried to make the tower diameter thicker, increase the minimum volume, etc. At this point, I do plenty of prints without the tower but I would still like to have one.

 

Has anyone figured out a way to make a custom prime tower in Cura? Currently my approach is just importing 2 stl's of my own towers (one for each material) and then importing my actual part. Non-uniform scaling allows me to adjust the z-height of the towers to the height of the part.

 

However, I just can't figure out the order in which different objects are printed in the same layer. The ideal order would be model tower, model parts of the thing I'm printing, support tower, support parts of the thing I'm printing. Is there really even a way to do this? I'd appreciate any help 🙂

 

 

[StevenD90s 1]

I try to avoid tall prime towers for the same reason.

 

I have tried:

1) reorienting the part so the prime tower does not have to be so tall.

2) widening the tower so the base has more strength (maybe 40mm diameter),

3) I always add a brim to the prime tower for better adhesion in the "dual extrusion" settings

3) and finally I would try slowing down "prime tower speed" in the speed settings to 20mm/s or less for both extruders to minimize the lateral force.

 

Best of luck to you!

[geert_2 505]

Maybe you could switch off prime towers in the slicer, and make your own in CAD, as part of your design? Then you can make them exactly as you want?

 

Similar to the way I make my "dummy cooling towers" in CAD, to move the nozzle away from small objects, so they get more cooling time.

 

The green cube here is a dummy cooling tower, otherwise the top area of the yellow part would not print well, it would deform because the heat can not escape. These models are quite small: for reference, text caps height is only 3.5mm, and text legs are 0.5mm wide. The dummy cooling tower has a custom brim, also designed in CAD, and a hollow area at the bottom where no cooling is needed.