It was a bit too big for my machine so I scaled it down and printed it diagonally.
It took about 4 hours plus an hour for the raft. Because the sides slope in quite quickly, Skeinforge switches to 100% fill for a lot of the layers because the edges don't have anything two layers above them. This can be fixed by selecting 3 extra shells on sparse layers. That means the infill starts far enough from the edge to have something two layers above it. You get a stronger object with less plastic that way.
Looking at the profile of the detail, and the fact that it took an hour to print the raft: maybe most of it can be left out, printed much more scarcely, with only part under and around the detail printed in full?
ReplyDeleteYes that is what commercial machines do but I am a lazy programmer! I just calculate the bounding box of the first layer and expand it. I should find all the outlines in the first layer and expand those and work out a zigzag that will fill them.
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