Support material

It doesn't seem like people are giving much thought to support material, and overhangs are present in a lot of designs. Does anyone have any leads on some kind of water soluble extrudable material in filament form?

There's been a lot of talk and speculation over the years. To my knowledge, however, nothing has been done about water soluble support material.

Indeed, until very recently precious little was done about support material of any kind. Ian has done the best, latest work.

[blog.reprap.org]

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Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

Enriques skeinforge does support material very well I'm still tunning the settings and it is slow as having only one head it changes temp 2 times per layer, but it works and I've printed stuff I could not have without it.

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Ian
[www.bitsfrombytes.com]

I've had access in the past to professional rapid prototypes and it was a lot of fun. I've been following reprap for a while and am looking into building my own in the near future. It seems to me that practical support material is the major thing keeping reprap as project for people who want to build a machine instead of a project for people who want to build things with the machine.

Using the same plastic that is used in building as the support seems very limiting to me. First, from the tests I have seen, it can lead to breakage if it is attached to parts that are at all fragile. Second, it is not particularly suitable for shapes where the support material is not easy accessible. Finally, using ABS (or whatever) seems an expensive solution for something that is meant to be thrown away.

In another thread I saw a suggestion to try melted sugar as a support material. If no one else has done anything by the time I have something up and running, I might experiment with that.