Friday, July 4, 2014

Day 312 - Friday Fail: Bracelet edition

Guess what, I started a bracelet project.


Here's what I've learned so far:
  • If your design is a solid hockey-puck bracelet shape and you print it with 0% infill, no roof, and no floor, then the raft will still print as a solid disk that uses more filament than the bracelet itself.
  • If you try to print a bracelet without a raft on the Mini, then you will have some pink spaghetti.
  • If your design is a solid hockey-puck shape with a smaller hockey-puck shape removed, then the mesh of the removed shape has to match up with the mesh of the large shape, if you want to try to print something thin.
  • If your design is a thin extruded curve to be used as a bracelet, don't make it too thin; the printer will try to make it as thin as you designed it.
  • Layer height and nozzle width are not the same thing.
  • Don't be cheap and make the raft super small, or the bracelet will rip when you take it off the raft.
  • The cosine of 0 is 1, but the sine of 0 is 0 and will kill everything.
  • If you use linear_extrude in OpenScad with too many slices, then the model won't slice well and will have strange artifacts when it prints.
  • The answer is slices=height/.4. Stay tuned...

2 comments:

  1. Three words - Spiral Vase Mode. Slic3r has it, and I believe Cura too, but I don't know whether the software for the Mini does. . .

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  2. Alas, the Mini doesn't have that. In the MakerBot software you can select 0% infill, and you can turn off the floor and roof, but the center part of the raft still prints. I'm sick of this problem so I'm designing bracelets that start out as shells instead of hockey-pucks. They work now!

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