Fine Feature Extrusion

[Jake_Spr 0]

Hello Community!

 

I am currently working on printing a part that has holes, pins and walls as small as 0.25 mm. I am using an S3 printer with 0.4 mm nozzle and PLA. 

 

I isolated the finest pins in the model and tried to print them separately, figuring that the parameters that print these satisfactorily will work for the rest of the model. I have played with layer height, print speed, line width and other parameters but am unable to print holes 0.5 mm wide or smaller and pins 0.25 mm wide.

 

I have shared the photos of the parameters I have used and the print. Any suggestions on how I could print these features?

[Slashee_the_Cow 271]

A 0.1mm line width is incredibly hard to achieve on a 0.4mm nozzle. The general guideline is 60-150% of the nozzle diameter, which means 0.24-0.6mm for a 0.4mm nozzle. That will also make a 0.25mm thick pin impossible because because you can only print in multiples of the line width.

 

You also need to allow for tolerance: you can't print a pin the exact same size as the hole. It will be a literally impossibly tight squeeze. I usually have a tolerance of about 0.3mm to be able to put parts together.

 

Your acceleration rate is too high for precise work (it should probably be about 500mm/s²) and your jerk is far too high (should probably be about 4mm/s instead of 40). If these settings increase the print time significantly, remember: good print > fast print.

 

To have the best chances of printing something like this, you'd need a smaller nozzle. 0.2mm are fairly common. 0.1mm can be found but I've heard they're very hard to work with without just getting clogged.

 

But ultimately, I think the precision you're trying to pull off is just going to be literally impossible to achieve on any consumer grade FDM printer.