3d printing service

[jhitesma]

I do like slic3r tho. I had a few spare moments to tinker around with it earlier and it's not much more difficult to use than cura. It does however make me wonder why cura has such a hard time slicing thin objects. You'd think with how popular cura is they would have this issue at the top of their Todo list. I'm half tempted to contact them and see if they know about this issue and plan on future update fixes for it.

The devs are well aware of it. It comes up in requests fairly often. Basically the way their code works at a very low level means it's not going to happen as they'd have to more or less rewrite the entire slicing logic from scratch When I first ran into it I did some googling and found a couple of threads on the reprap forum discussing it and a few issues in their github - I got the impression the devs are tired of hearing about it and have zero interest in fixing it as they consider single perimeter walls to be an uncommon edge case that most people don't care about.

 

[flyboa]

I had this printed up. It is .2mm layer/Adapt with between 40-60% infil. Hollow and stronger than I need.
14g. Maybe I could go with a .5mm shell.

 

[jhitesma]

Had another thought on this last night. In addition to spiral vase mode slic3r has variable layer heights. So I figured maybe using a smaller layer height at the top would help with the tricky tip. And I could use a taller layer height for the body to make up for the slower thinner layers at the top...and thicker layers supposedly work better with clear filament.

Well they didn't look any better but the time was actually 5 minutes faster - so I also slowed it down to 40% for the last 1/4" of height or so. And got the best top yet. Unfortunately this lousy makergeeks filament jammed right near the top causing a weak layer that failed shortly after printing.

So I gave it one more try...and busted out a roll of Nylon since there was talk about whether this part would be strong or not. I found that even the PLA parts are pretty resilient (other than the one with the bad section from the jamming filament.) But the nylon one should be REALLY tough.

That's the nylon on the far right it's not as transparent - and you can see some sections where it looks "bubbly" because apparently this roll absorbed a bit of moisture even though I've had it in my dehumidifier And the very top is still a tiny bit off. But it's probably the best print yet and very tough. Also Nylon can by dyed with aniline dyes. (RIT will work but you need to heat it and it's still not as vibrant. I suggest pysanky egg dyes - they give great vibrant results!)

Theoretically nylon is also less dense than PLA so should be a little lighter...but it's close enough in density that in a part this small and light already my scale can't tell the difference.

 

[flyboa]

They all look good even the jammed print one can be cut and glued.

 

[jhitesma]

They all look good even the jammed print one can be cut and glued.

Even easier it's actually two pieces so no need to cut. Though gluing a single perimeter like that could be tricky - not a lot of surface area to work with!

 

[flyboa]

The guy who printed up the white nose cone said he used infill on just the shell and was able to get a strong print. So infill is also used on hollow bodies.

 

[jhitesma]

The way I did these there's no infill. It's a single perimeter - just a thin bead of plastic about 0.50mm wide since I thought that was what you were going for. The PLA may not hold up very well being that thin but the Nylon should. I can pinch the nylon so the sides touch and it just pops right back...but the nose is pretty stiff because of the cone shape.

 

[flyboa]

He printed my nose cone with a 1mm shell on a .2 mm nossle. Much stronger than I need. A soft shell with a stiff nose would work.

 

[jhitesma]

I tried printing in nylon again to get rid of the inconsistent extrusion - but it seems that at any temp I keep getting it no matter what I try so it's probably just this roll of nylon (it's a roll of surprisingly cheap generic inland Nylon from microcenter that I tried just because of how cheap it was compared to the Taulman nylon I usually use - so I'm not surprised that it's kind of inconsistent.) Even though it's only a week old right out of the still vacuum sealed bag it wass acting like parts of it have water in them - and after a week in my dehydrator it's still the same. Still for the price I can't complain too much. And it still seems plenty strong.

One of the prints failed - right where the curve of the nose starts it came off the print bed (I was lazy and hadn't cleaned/prepped it properly) so I wound up with just the body part and figured I'd see how strong it is:

This is 0.48mm thick single wall. And even after all that I let it sit for a few minutes and it's back to it's original shape. I've also tried pulling it apart with a finger from each hand in it and haven't had any luck. I've also tried pulling the layers apart with both hands both in the "clean" sections and the fuzzy looking sections where it looks like there may have been moisture in the filament - and still it took all the abuse I could toss at it without getting out any tools

So - pretty sure that despite not looking perfect these nylon ones would do quite well as a nosecone for a DLG.

 

[flyboa]

This DLG pod turned out nice. I had it custom designed and printed in PLA.

 

[newguy2012]

What would you charge for this? There are multiple parts. Shipped to 62216