Creating a single wall spiral in slicer program

Hi,

I want to experiment with printing torsion/spiral springs for a project. My requirements are low force over a large number of revolutions, so I need thin walls spaced closely together. Therefore I want the walls to be single wall. I.e I just want the printer to draw a spiral, with ONE wall. As far as I know, making a thin spiral cad model, the slicing software will still make two walls.

How do I best go about this? I'm kind of stuck.

I would think that if you make the wall the thickness of your nozzle then it would be one pass. I have made single wall supports this way. My nozzle is .35mm so I made a support wall .35mm and it only made one pass.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2013 04:34PM by tmorris9.

Just thinking about this and it's probably not a good idea. You see the reason I made support 1 perimeter is because I could easily squeeze and crush it to remove it. So may be too weak to make a spring unless you are using a .5mm nozzle.

i just had a idea, just make 2 springs and join them at the ends so that in slicer you could just do a spiral vase print and you would end up with 2 springs to boot if you needed more than one.

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[mike-mack.blogspot.com]

turn off infill, and set to one perimeter. if you use cura, you can use Joris feature which is specifically for water tight single wall objects. z axis is constantly changing around object so there is no layer artifact.

[software.ultimaker.com]

So I tried making the model that I wanted, but Slic3r won't slice it. I've waited 20 minutes and it's stuck on "analyzing model" or whatever the first step is. I've attached the stl-file.

I've tried analyzing the model in netfabb but it doesn't give any clues.

Anyone have any ideas what's wrong? I mean it's a simple model, I don't get why it wouldn't work.

Did you try netfab.?

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[mike-mack.blogspot.com]

Wow, I played with your object a bit, I am pretty good at solving problems but I see no problems with your file. I am thinking now that there is a problem with Slic3r, for some reason it can't handle that file, it's not that complex but for some reason it's choking on it. I see nothing wrong with it. I just can't explain it.

Hmm okay. Then we're on the same page. I really don't get what the problem is either.
I guess I'll try some different spirals and see if I can figure out the problem.

Ok, so the primary issue seems to be the thin walls. Making the walls 2 mm instead of my planned 0.7 mm allows the part to slice properly. printing only walls on that would give me two separate springs after I cut them off each other.

Where do I inform slic3rs developer of bugs? This is clearly one.

Could you make the spring oversize and then scale it down in slic3r? Maybe then it would slice the file. So make the walls 2 mm thick in the STL, then use the scale function to scale it. At a scale of 35% the walls should come out at .7mm. Hopefully.
Good luck
Mike

slic3r does not do well with single wall objects unless they are water tight solid meshes. this is a single line spring spiral with one wall and no water tight mesh. my computer spent 196 minutes processing it before i killed the task.


loaded cura right up and 15 seconds later i had gcode. different slicers are used on printing. i prefer slic3r, but for some of those odd jobs i go back and forth between cura and skeinforge. also kisslicer seems to work well although its settings are not typical so it takes more time to setup beyond defaults.

anyway cura has come a long way, and seems to process about anything these days. with the speed improvements I'm finding myself more drawn to it.

here is the download link: [software.ultimaker.com]

as for developer support of slic3r, here is the page that shows the email address of the author [slic3r.org]

his name is ◦Alessandro Ranellucci


he only requests you search the faq page before contacting him. seems reasonable.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/14/2013 08:07PM by jamesdanielv.

Just tried it with Skeinforge and it slices fine without any modification.

Slic3r however seems to be stuck on the first layer. Usually it is faster than Skeinforge but now it has been stuck on the first layer longer than Skeinforge took to complete the whole thing, so I guess it is safe to assume that it is permanently stuck there. There's just something that it doesn't like about it. Just out of curiosity I'll leave it running overnight to see what happens.