How are you removing supports?

Please share your techniques for getting the struts off cleanly!

What are your tools of choice?

When do you use what?

Do you have any techniques with Pre-Form to help?

Once you contribute, please update your post later rather than add new ones to keep noise down! : D

It appears you can’t edit your comments, so nevermind! Comment away! :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ll answer my own question! I’ve done my first three prints now and just tweezed them apart the first two times, which was surprisingly clean, but made it very easy to damage the surface.

I did a very small model for my last print, and tried cuticle cutters. They were okay, but the “squishing” of the plastic being pinched made it leave a pretty rough mark. I was able to work much more carefully than doing the brute force tweezer method, so that’s nice.

Need to experiment with exactos and the like. Also haven’t really messed with the generator setting much yet, so I imagine tweaking the defaults would help.

I’m doing some miniatures stuff, so getting clean breaks on the struts is pretty important, as sanding some part would be tough without really roughing up the surface.

If people have

Up until the most recent update I found that using wire cutters or something similar to separate the base into tiny pieces only connected to one or two touch points at a time made removing them very easy.  Using a Micro Mark Sprue Cutting tool or even just a finer pair of cutters I have been able to remove supports from features right at the minimum level the printer advertises (.012 thou).  With the new supports I have been struggling to find a new way to separate the supports individually or near individually to reduce separation force necessary.

Thanks,

Dylan Jackson

Expensive Habit Engineering

dyjax@expensivehabitengineering.com