Printing Text Limits

[silvio-tidu 0]

Hi!

I'm a new UM2 user, and I'm trying to understand what are the limits of print quality.

Cause I would like to use the printer to obtain good prototypes, I'm trying to figure out what are the best settings in this case to obtain small texts.

This text it's very small

and this is the first print whit cura high quality default settings

This one with layer height of 0.06

and the last it's 0.04 and i've increased the temp. to 230°

these are the last settings:

anyone of you with a lot of patience can help me to get best quality print settings?

 

[IRobertI 428]

Decreasing your layer height wont help at all with those letters. Layer height only affects the quality in the z-direction (up and down). In the x-y your nozzle diameter decides how thin the lines you can print are. The letters are also probably affected by shrinkage of the plastic. Circles in particular has a tendency to come out smaller than you specify in your CAD program since the plastic rings constrict when they cool down.

For this particular piece I would probably try printing it standing on its side instead and see how that goes.

 

[yellowshark 123]

I am thinking that you are using 0.04 at 20m/s IMHO 230c is way too hot. I would try 200c; increase by 5 degrees if you get under extrusion. You also might want to try a different filament; a change in filament and/or colour may help. If you can, then embossing rather than engraving the letters would be worth a try

 

[jonnybischof 58]

- Print very slowly. 20 or 30 mm/s (I always do 30mm/s)

- Use "minimal" printing temperature (see below)

- Use 100% fan speed

- Make sure your extrusion is very well tuned. No overextrusion, no underextrusion

"minimal printing temperature":

This is heavily dependent on your material. Some PLA is hard to print at all below 200°C, while there are sorts of PLA that print perfectly at 180°C. You'll have to experiment on that...

/edit:

Your part will look a lot better with small layer heights (not the text, but the top face of the model). 0.06mm or even a bit lower should be optimal.

I'd suggest starting at 0.06mm and tuning your settings. Then you can go lower if desired.

/edit 2:

The text is really tiny. The inside part of the "A" for example can't be printed, it's too small. You can probably print this "well legible" with well tuned settings. But if you want it to look really good, you'll need to make it bigger.

You could use a "stroke font" which has a defined line thickness. Make it 0.41mm thick and embossed instead of engraved, like yellowshark suggests. This may or may not work, it's not really a strength of FDM 3D printing...

/edit3:

One last thing:

With Cura's "layer view", you can see how the printer will actually print the part. You can see a lot of things there without having to actually print the part.

 

[gr5 898]

For this particular piece I would probably try printing it standing on its side

 

That's my first advice. This is difficult to print with a .4mm diameter nozzle. So print vertical.

 

I am thinking that you are using 0.04 at 20m/s IMHO 230c is way too hot. I would try 200c; increase by 5 degrees if you get under extrusion. You also might want to try a different filament; a change in filament and/or colour may help

 

Yes. That might help also. But definitely try vertical.

Alternatively you can do multi color by changing the filament part way through a print:

This is a crude example but you can get much finer detail and fonts when you use 2 colors. I really need to upload better examples some day.

 

[yellowshark 123]

I was going to mention George's thread on the dual colour approach, his thread has some great detail on how to do it - but I cannot remember the thread - maybe George does!

 

[gr5 898]

I posted details here but this is only one way to do it. When I do it again I will do it differently:

https://www.youmagine.com/designs/galaxy-s4-ballistic-case