Has anyone played around with minimizing part spacing on the fuse? Formlabs defaults to 5mm from the wall and 2mm between parts, but given their more than generous margins on other parameters like raft thickness & support size I’m curious if anyone has played with bringing these down, especially with small parts that don’t cover a ton of Z length
I fill the chamber with small rectangular parts spaced 1mm apart and very close to the chamber wall, perhaps within 1mm or less. I don’t experience any issues with these parts in fact they consistently measure in spec.
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We consistently use the settings of 2 mm spacing between components and 0 mm spacing from the outer wall.
The default settings for PA12 include a 1.6 mm thick surface amor. Theoretically, the part spacing should therefore be relatively easy to adjust to 1.8 mm, perhaps even down to 1.6 mm. With these settings, the surface amor would not overlap. However, a fully cooled build chamber would then be more difficult to break apart for unpacking. The difference in our parts between 2 mm and 1.8 mm spacing is extremely minimal, so we print everything with a 2mm spacing because this works extremely reliably. In an extremely densely packed build chamber, this could make a bigger difference, as more parts could then be packed in. However, in such densely packed build chambers, the thermal behavior during printing would also be more likely to change. Therefore, this would need to be tested accordingly.
With a 2mm gap between components and 0mm to the outer wall, we are already below the recommended values for, say, EOS Industrie systems.
Rather than fighting for those last few tenths of a millimeter, we’d much rather maintain our success rate of over 98%.
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