Tower in SF45

[danzen 0]

Hi all,

I've recently decided to try out the tower plugin in SF45 in an effort to reduce stringing. I am very very happy with the results.

I was printing at 0.1mm layer height and I set the maximum tower height to 10 layers. The reduction in stringing was very significant, though I think it would also vary depending on the model.

However, the tower plugin seems to be doing something rather unintelligent.

Upon finishing the first tower/island, the head moves to the next and the platform rises 1mm (or the head drops 1mm depending on your perspective). So far so good.

Then a layer is printed but instead of dropping the platform by 0.1mm and printing the next layer, it drops to the height of the previous tower/island (downwards 1mm in this iteration) and rises back to the next layer where it's suppose to print (upwards 0.9mm).

This pattern continues, i.e., drop 0.9mm, rise 0.8mm, print layer, drop 0.8mm, rise 0.7mm, print layer, drop 0.7mm, rise 0.6mm, print layer, and so on...

Not sure if I'm getting the point across here but this seems very inefficient and sometimes causes stringing within the tower/island itself which normally shouldn't happen.

Anybody else have the same issue?

[Daid 278]

The tower plugin is not used very often, and VERY dangerous. If you have more then 2 towers it can move the head trough a tower while moving from one tower to the next.

I've used it once, but I didn't find the results very good. But that was at my early days.

[danzen 0]

The tower plugin is not used very often, and VERY dangerous. If you have more then 2 towers it can move the head trough a tower while moving from one tower to the next.

I did a quick test, printing 16 cylindrical pillars (4x4) each with a diameter of 5mm and a height of 10mm. The pillars have a spacing of 5mm and are placed on top of a 2mm thick base.

The pillars were printed in the following order:

 

10  13  15  166   8  11  143   4   7  121   2   5   9

 

So the head definitely moves trough other towers while moving from one to the next, but no collision like what you said.

One thing I forgot to mention in my first post, because the platform repeatedly moves up and down while printing a tower/island (other than the first one), there is significant blobbing since Z motion is not nearly as fast as X-Y motion.

So while there is significantly less stringing, there is also significantly more blobbing. As it is now, stringing is replaced with blobbing, which is why I'm wondering the purpose (if there is indeed one) of the repeated up and down motion?