Spiralize - black art?

[fingerpuk 0]

Hello.

So, after reading that spiralize would give a better out finish I thought Id' try it. 0.8mm walls and 0 infill so the head can go round and round and round...

What I'm actually getting is a solid model, and tons of retraction. The opposite of what I asked for Are there specific settings for spiralize that mean you just get the walls, zero reiteration, and the head going round and round and round...

Cheers.

 

[IRobertI 521]

Enabling Spiralize in the expert settings should turn off infill for you. Could you post your settings perhaps?

Also note that setting the wall thickness to 0.8mm will mean cura will tell your printer to do 0.8mm in a single pass. I think 0.8mm is about the maximum you can get away with before it squirts out the side of the tip of the print head (I haven't measured this though). Keep this in mind when you pick your print speed.

Layer view in cura doesn't work well with spiralize enabled btw, you'll get a weird flower pattern.

 

[cor3ys 28]

When i used spiralize many many months ago i had trouble getting a water tight base using 0.8 i had to settle for 0.6 but i have seen you should just about be able to push 1mm with it but i could not achieve this...

But now i have a lot more experience with the machine i should try again to see what i can get....

 

[fingerpuk 0]

It was printing very thick bottom layers, so it was full for a few mm. Then it was hollow. The outer surface is amazing, much better than I have seen otherwise, but without the infill if failed on the horizontal surfaces.

I feel the key to amazing levels of quality is in working out where to perform retraction, I think it should always happen o the infill part, then head out and around, then back in, retract...

Hope Daid is listening.

 

[Daid 306]

Spiralize is a black magic feature. (Thanks, I wasn't sure on how to categorize it yet, black magic is a perfect category for it)

It's one of those things that I can give little guarantee on, other then "it works for Joris"

 

[illuminarti 18]

It was printing very thick bottom layers, so it was full for a few mm. Then it was hollow. The outer surface is amazing, much better than I have seen otherwise, but without the infill if failed on the horizontal surfaces.

 

It does exactly one pass, of whatever width you specify, around the outside of the shape. So you simply can't do 'horizontal surfaces' as they imply more than a single nozzle width at that height. But for continuously curving shapes like vases and cups, it's pretty cool.

One thing to bear in mind is that it uses the width that you specify for *everything* including the infill on the base. So if you specify a wall width of 0.8mm, and a bottom layer height of 0.3mm, and print it at 60mm/s, you'll be trying to extrude 0.8x0.3x60 = 14.4mm³/s, and probably just freak out the extruder.