First time printer...hollow model is being filled in.

[circuitburn 0]

Hi all,

 

I've just assembled a new PrintrBot Simple Metal and ran through some calibrations and the first recommended print, the fan shroud. Thought I'd have a go in Sketchup at creating a part for a cosplay and my resulting print isn't coming out like the STL in the 3d viewer. I'm guessing somewhere in the conversion to g-code there's a problem.

 

Here's what the part looks like in Cura:

 

 

and here's the resulting print.

 

 

I stopped it once I realized it was going to add a layer almost every pass around the part. It looks like it's at the first 'step' out inside the hexagon.

 

How can I check that this isn't going to happen with my prints? And what can I do about it?

 

[gr5 2,192]

First and foremost - never print anything without looking at it in slice view first. This would have shown what it was going to print.

Now to fix the problem. I don't understand what the problem is in you specific case but sketchup lets you put walls anywhere so you can get internal walls inside a solid (which confuses cura) and you can get holes in your objects (also confuses cura). Other cad programs like solidworks or DSM - or openSCAD - well this is impossible. They model solids - not faces. So it's impossible to get this. Anyway Cura has an XRAY mode in the gui. Click that icon and if you see any red there is a problem in your model.

Also there are features in advanced called "fix horrible". If your model has no red in xray mode try unchecking all 4 of these. Otherwise you can sometimes fix the print by fooling with these checkboxes (instead of fixing it in sketchup).

 

[circuitburn 0]

Thanks for the help. It turns out the model wasn't completely solid. Like you said, I had walls within the structure that needed to be removed.

There's a great plugin for Sketchup called Solid Inspector (https://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/solid-inspector) that really helped me identify where the model wasn't considered closed. An import into netfabb to scale the model and I was set to print.