I'm designing and printing some small keychain flowers I'm looking t only about 45mm round and 43 layers. Was thing ink of making it ssolid but thought I'd ask. I want to achieve a nice smooth top and bottom.
I've been having problems getting a smooth finish but actually it depends on what filament I'm using. Some print beautiful one some not quite.
Look atthi smiley face I did? Bottom is beautiful but the top not so much.
Printing solid is more difficult. The reason is if you are over extruding more than a small amount, you will have problems with top surface quality because the nozzle will be dragging across the surface as it prints leaving unwanted marks and depressions. It will also tend to make the print over sized in X-Y because the plastic has to go somewhere so it squeezes outward and make holes smaller. The reason the plastic has nowhere else to go is there are no partial layers underneath to accept the additional plastic and provide some cushion
Of course if you under extrude, you will have all the problems associated with under extruding, gaps and skipped details, etc.
So you have two choices, spend a lot of time getting your printer tuned to perfection. Or, print with something like 50 to 75% infill instead, which, if you over extrude, will not be a problem because the extra plastic will have somewhere to go, other than out and up. At that high of an infill on a machine that is over extruding a little, it will essentially be a solid part.
You will want to tune your printer reasonably well in order to get a good top surface finish. So I typically aim for slight over-extruding so I don't get any gaps anywhere, but not so much as to hurt the top surface.
Some people use a technique called ironing to improve top finish quality, but S3D does not support this capability yet. Other slicers can do this.
Thanks for your reply. I was starting to think that all layers and 0 infill was causing more problems than it's worth. Also I seem remember something about Infill and print speed.
I have do a extruder test again but that seems to vary with the brand of filament I'm using. I use 3 different brands and soleprint beautifully while others (like the yellow above) sometimes is less than perfect.
I also need to look at the Extruder width in the process settings. Normally it's set at auto (=48mm) I see I did one print at manual 0.60mm.
Also some of my bottom layers are so thin you can see through them.
I'll re-work the smiley with 50% infill.. Lately I;'ve been using the Fast Honeycomb.
As for slicers, I trashed that new Prusa slicer for other printers. Could never get that set for Ender 5. I do still have my old original slicer; Ideamaker.
