Slice single-wall surface with cutout

[mikedkelly 0]

I am new to 3D Printing and am trying to slice the attached stl file. The outside skin and tubes were modeled as surfaces (0mm thickness) and the supports are thin solids (.2mm thick). My desire is for the skin and tubes to print with a single wall and the supports to print with 2 walls. This prints fine without the cutout, but with it added Cura removes sections of the skin along the z-axis. Admittedly, I have been hacking Cura to get these to print as opposed to modeling them correctly, so I am open to input on what to do correctly in my CAD software. I have tried turning on surface mode, but it removes some of the tube supports and no longer prints all of the attached bodies with a single extrusion path as it did before. I am using Windows 11 and Cura 4.13.1 but have also tried in Cura 5.2.0. Thanks for any input.

Left Wing 1.stl

Edited January 13, 2023 by mikedkelly

[GregValiant 1,408]

Try it with a 0.4 nozzle at 0.35 Line Width.  I thought it looked pretty good.

I usually print boat hulls thicker at .8 line width as they aren't near as fussy about weight.  If you wanted to print this at 0.6 line width you could do that by jacking up the flow in Cura, or just adding an M221 S150 line to the beginning of the gcode file.  If you try to do it with the line width then Cura will skip areas.

This is at .35 Line Width.

(BTW the bottom of the model isn't flat.  That's why the skirt is cutting across short of the leading edge.)

 

[mikedkelly 0]

Thanks for taking a look and getting back to me. I need to work on using surface mode as that seems to be the only way to get the entire skin to print. With surface mode it prints the inside structure first and then the skin, which will cause unusable stringing with the foaming PLAs. I'm hoping to get the scenario that you see on the first 20 layers if you have surface mode set to normal. Lots more for me to learn.

[GregValiant 1,408]

Yes, you will need to use surface mode.

Here we are looking straight down a gap between the internal ribs and the upper and lower skins of the wing.  A bit of over-extrusion would glue them together, but not by much.

[mikedkelly 0]

Yes, that is the hack that lets the top skin extrude in a single path and the bottom skin plus all the supports extrude without retraction or travel. I essentially print the entire layer in a single path. It bonds fine with both active and passive foaming filaments.