a question about printing with support

Discussion in 'BigBox General Chat' started by R Design, May 29, 2016.

  1. R Design

    R Design Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Oct 7, 2015
    Messages:
    944
    Likes Received:
    190
    Am Pro and not Dual.

    One of the reasons is that, although I've never seen it in person, the thought of the print head having to make a trip to the dock - and all that purging/waste - every single layer I find quite painful.

    Now this marvellous scaffold material seems like a great leap forward for tricky prints but is it really necessary to use it for anything except the LAYERS WHICH COME INTO CONTACT with the part?

    Does anyone see a way to adapt the Gcode for a part with support so that 99% of the support is printed with part material? The printhead would just start making trips to the dock on the layers which absolutely had to have scaffold because they were touching the part.

    Would that amount to a worthy increase in speed and reduction of waste?
     
  2. Alex9779

    Alex9779 Moderator
    Staff Member

    Joined:
    Sep 4, 2015
    Messages:
    2,411
    Likes Received:
    735
    You have to consider where you have the supports.

    When talking about supports we often only think about supporting overhangs but you could also have support in the middle of a part and access that cavitiy only by some holes.
    I agree for the "outer" support you could print the whole structure with the main material and only the intersecting layer with Scaffold.
    But S3D lacks this function, Slic3r has this. But Slic3r has no manual supports... ( I want a new version of S3D soon with that feature! ;))
    "Inner" support you have to print all with a solvable material to wash it out because you wont be able to remove the structures.
    Remember that "ball" someone printed and showed here? Dunno who, maybe @PsyVision or @Spoon Unit, and do not find it at the moment, all the support is within the part...

    While Slic3r can print the structure with the main and only some layers with the solvable material, it is not possible to choose where to do what, so if you have inner support structures all support has to be with made with the support material.

    If you do that you also have to take care of the temperature of for the support material. Scaffold doesn't like it to be kept hot for longer than 15 minutes or so. So you have to take care of that, heat up only when you need it, cool down if you have a lot of layers between the usage points of Scaffold.
    But maybe that's not a big problem, I did such prints and because of the "ram purge" there is very few material in the nozzle and I didn't have issues with that...
     
    mike01hu likes this.

Share This Page