Floating Supports on a Curved Plane

[amarino9 0]

I've been working on a few different versions of this part for some time. This is the first time I've printed it in this orientation because its a sliding part on another 3D printed piece, and this ended up being the best print orientation I can place it in to reduce print layers grinding on each other.

 

The first attempt I made at printing in this orientation had the supports on the inside curve of the part fail. The supports ended up correcting themselves overtime, but not without a major mess to clean up. I thought it was something I did on my end, until I noticed in this new gcode with a fresh version of the part, that those supports were never anchored down in the first place.

 

With basic auto generated supports, you can see a gap present between the part and the supports on the inside. I messed with a few support settings and still could not find a solution. I also used this video on creating custom supports by using the overlap in 'Per model settings' to take a cube and generate supports where it overlapped with the model. Still the same exact support issue persisted. 

 

 

 

Lastly, I tried using the Custom Supports Plugin by Krasimir Stefanov to try to manually generate the supports. I chose the specification on the supports to "drop to the build plate", regardless of the model dimensions. This is a simple example, but you can see that the upper section of the support still maintains this gap, the lower section as well.

 

 

What else can I do to fix my model? Is there anything I can do in my slicer settings to override this problem? I'm going to try to link the two previous versions of my 3mf file if that helps.AP_Pumpgrip_Final.3mf

 

CCR10S_AP_Pumpgrip_Final_box_overlapp.3mf

 

Thanks for the help!

[AndersK 59]

Welcome to the forum

 

There is a lot of settings regarding the support, in this case I altered the X/Y min distance to exaggerate the result.

Reducing it brings it closer but can also be more difficult to remove later

[amarino9 0]

Thanks for the help Anders! I'll play around with some of the settings with X/Y. Been printing for 2 years and there's still so much to learn.

 

For now, I found a really great solution. I found this video about using "Sacrificial Bridges" to support objects floating in space by creating a .2mm thick surface to build off of instead of using support material: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upqTE8EPZIQ&t=302s

 

 

Ended up being able to utilize this technique at the base of where my model begins to arc up, and require support. Once I had that bridge in place, I could place custom supports directly on that flat surface instead of all the way down where my models curves upward, which was the issue.

 

 

 

 

 

Once it finished, I was able to peel away that sacrificial bridge, and peel away the support material above it. Cut down about an hour of print time too!

 

Again, thanks for the look into my file and working through that. I'll play around with these settings and experiment a bit more.