Infills with a bigger second nozzle, how?

I print big, very big and nearly all my prints have 100% infill simply due to durability... Aaaand they have quite a lot of small surface-details there and here.

All that turns into ~30-40 hour prints simply due to infilling and me no likey. Sooo, i thought i'd get a second, larger nozzle to do the infills faster. Worked that far.

Problem is, the small areas are now left hollow where the bigger nozzle wont fit.

How do i infill those small areas with the small nozzle and the big open areas with the large nozzle?

Currently using Simplify3D. Dual Volcanos, chimera. 0.4mm and 1.2mm nozzles.


Notice the small areas left hollow in the pic.

If this was slic3r I would have no idea how to do the infill with the second head, but the infill overlap can be specified in percentage terms. Increasing this would surely eliminate some of the gaps, but might affect some of the small details effectively over-extruding in those areas. I wonder if S3D has a similar setting?

I have no idea if all the objects you print have large flat bases with detail on top, but why not print the base separately using your big nozzle and bond the more detailed portion on afterwards?

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/04/2017 08:50AM by DjDemonD.

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Simon Khoury

Co-founder of [www.precisionpiezo.co.uk] Accurate, repeatable, versatile Z-Probes
Published:Inventions

I think he's printing on top of a raft (purple), support in white, perimeters in blue, infill orange and top layers in green.

I have no experience with S3D but in slic3r you can specify that the infill is done with a separate extruder, you can also specify how small an area should be before it's ignored for infill.

Have you tried printing an extra perimeter rather than trying to get 100% infill density? in my experience infill is really only needed to support horizontal layers, if you want strength bump up the number of perimeters, you'll save massively on time, not to mention filament.

Idris

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{Precision Piezo} Accurate, repeatable, versatile z-probe plus piezo discs, endstop cables, pt100, 50w heaters.

+1 For extra perimeters for strength and reduction of time

In Slic3r you can also specify print modifiers. In your case, you would create the modifer model that just included the large nozzle infill areas. You'll have to experiment to see how the perimeters of the large nozzle infill areas would be printed.

Perimeters alone wont work. Even 3 perimeters flex a lot and making more takes a long while.

I'l just spit it out. These are AIRSOFT gun parts. Fielded components that take a few hits every now and then. They cant have any hollow sections.

Can Slic3r use both nozzles to do infills? I cant test it for a couple days, im on the move.

You can assign solid infill to the small nozzle and regular infill to the big one. Then define the threshold where slic3r uses solid infill.
Unfortunately this won't work where a single infill area has narrow and wide shape. You'd have to live with gaps or use a smaller nozzle and live with the longer print time.

I haven't tried it yet, but if you print only 10-15% infill without solid top infill, you could fill it later with epoxy resin. That would be quite tough stuff.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/05/2017 09:16AM by o_lampe.

I routinely print with four perimeters, sometimes as many as six or eight. It's true that adding perimeters will slow things down but you'll still save time over solid infill.

Idris

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{Precision Piezo} Accurate, repeatable, versatile z-probe plus piezo discs, endstop cables, pt100, 50w heaters.

Have you considered making the part hollow and filling them with something like resin?

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Simon Khoury

Co-founder of [www.precisionpiezo.co.uk] Accurate, repeatable, versatile Z-Probes
Published:Inventions

You may not have to switch nozzles.
It's possible to print 0.1 and 0.3 layer heights with a 0.4 nozzle.
Unfortunately I've only seen this option for supports via the Makerbot slicer. Model as 0.1 and supports as 0.3
Be cool if you can do this for perimeters and infill, with or without nozzle (print head) swaps.

doh, nm. Didn't read the op clearly.
Just add a few more perimeters, the small gaps between the perimeter and infill won't effect much as far as strength.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/06/2017 04:25PM by prot0typ1cal.

Slic3r can do combine infill every x layers which should in theory with 0.1mm perimeter layers only print infill every 3rd layer (with a 0.4mm nozzle) I've never tried it as I rarely print 0.1 or lower. I'm not sure if you could print 0.2mm perimeters and get away with infill every other layer with a 0.4mm nozzle, though a 0.5mm nozzle would allow this, and possibly save you half of the infill time. That being said for the strongest parts you want taller layers so 0.2mm are out anyway.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/06/2017 05:40PM by DjDemonD.

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Simon Khoury

Co-founder of [www.precisionpiezo.co.uk] Accurate, repeatable, versatile Z-Probes
Published:Inventions

Getting another printer will cut your print time in half