Another Reason Why I Love My Tantillus

Downloaded the Gridded Globe from Thingiverse, scaled it to 70%, added a small circular base, then did a quick test print:



Printed in PLA with 150 micron layers.

Next step is to decrease the layer height, fine tune the extruder retraction settings, and tilt the globe slightly so that it matches the original Unisphere.

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Lem Fugitt
3D Printing Dreams
Robots Dreams
"The map is not the territory."

Items like this that require thousands of retracts are always an issue for printing but is even more so for Bowden machines. The issue is really with the slicing software and its path planning. To work around it you can turn infill off ( 0 ) and then set the perimeters higher than 5 and it will print each island one at a time instead of print all the perimeters and then going back and doing infill after.

Another tip for printing items that do a lot of travel moves is to increase the travel speed. This should only be done on machines that are well broken in and when you are comfortable with the machine. You will need to increase the max feedrate on X and Y in the firmware from 150 to 180 and then increase the travel speed in Slic3r to match. You can go even faster but the faster you go the more likely skips steps will be.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2012 06:29PM by Sublime.

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Thanks. That's very helpful.

As you pointed out, I can see that most of the problem comes from the slicing software path planning.

In addition to getting it to print each island completely, it would be great if we could control the start point(s). I could live with some of the irregularities if I had control over where they appear on the part.

For example, if I could specify that the path start at the back of the part, then the irregularities would end up on a non-critical side of the part. For functional parts it isn't a big concern, but for aesthetic designs it becomes an important issue.

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Lem Fugitt
3D Printing Dreams
Robots Dreams
"The map is not the territory."