Remove Raft Under Empty Space

Feature Requests & Ideas
1

Hello friends,

I have a form 2, it is amazing.

I ran into a software issue recently when printing a large thin ring.

It needs to be printed flat due to both inside and out being “presentation edges”.

Unfortunately, the raft is generated with a large flat open space in the middle that wastes resin.

It’s not much, but considering how expensive it is, the cost adds up.

I tried cutting the part in 2 and printing, but the results were not suitable for the customer.

Here are the stats;

Part - 0.96ml
Ring With Supports - 10.94ml
Half Rings With Supports - 7ml

Considering resin is $0.25/ml

That’s nearly AUD$1 difference in material cost. That’s not taking into account extra wear and tear on the build tray either.

My only other option would be to generate supports in CAD and leave them as part of the model, which is not ideal.

Can this be looked at?

[Album] Imgur

Inside red area is wasted.

Cheers

Ashley Cobb

1 Like
2

I agree that this could be updated to be more efficient.

For not what we need to do is create a gapnb between support points for the software to “find a hole” and hollow out the center. Your screen shot above is getting close to this at about the 1:00 position on the part. Just a little more gap there and it should open up the center.

I create these gaps parallel to the peel direction and that seems to hlep with any distortion at that point on the model.

3

You can find a workaround to a similar problem in this thread.

4

I would also highly recommend against printing with that orientation, when it’s parallel to the surface that makes a very large area that’s not connected to the supports and usually the layer will fall apart when it slides and pulls up after the layer, if you angle it a bit then it will start at a smaller point and then build up the rest of the print

5

Thanks for the feedback and work around.

For what it’s worth, I would not normally print an object in a flat orientation like this, but the part needed presentation faces on inside and outside of the ring so did not want to risk clipping the supports, which sometimes takes resin with it since it is so brittle.

Also, on the 2 half rings I used way more support points and manually placed each one, and the part came out fine using the mating object and a tiny pin head worth of resin cured in the sun.

Cheers

Ash