I’m looking for some input on Cura and Slic3r. When I started my 3D printing adventures, Cura seemed the way to go. But then I started seeing some the neat features of Slic3r and have been using it more lately. However, Slic3r never seems to connect the infill to the shell. I always seem to have a gap between the inner shell and the infill. I never saw that in Cura. Anyone able to help with that?
I would be interested in that information as well. Slic3r has some really interesting features; however, it seems to leave gaps 
Thanks for the link! I’ve just read over the material in the above link. I appreciate that he was trying to print durable gears and no doubt that he succeeded. It doesn’t really address my particular needs - what I like about Slic3r is the ability to make astetically pleasing patterns in the infill. The problem that I’m trying to resolve is exactly what is shown in his picture of an optimized small gear - the voids in the teeth do not look good and will not vapor smooth very well. I’m puzzled why Slic3r leaves voids; Cura for example, rarely if ever leaves even a tiny void. I guess, building off of the linked materials, a lot of trial and error testing is in order…
Can you post a photo of the problem? A Slic3r user might then be able to tell you which setting to adjust. There might be insufficient extrusion rate or insufficient infill overlap. Also note that each program has its own idea of what 100% extrusion rate means.
I was not talking about gaps in the infill. I was referring to gaps between the infill and the shell. There is often a perfectly contiguous gap around the inner perimeter of the shell which in my thinking should be joined to the infill but isn’t. Off the top of my head I’d say maybe 0.5mm gap.
It’s already set to 25%, up from the default 15%. So, I should increase to to 200% or something? Increasing by 10% didn’t appear to do anything.
Was fine with Cura. And yes, I’m quite sure. Backlash symptoms are quite obvious and you wouldn’t have a consistent result around entire print.
Give MatterControl a look too. You can use slicer or cura engine (or matter slice, which is an improved cura) and it has a lot of other nice features (cloud library, software leveling, baby-stepping during printing, etc)
Ok, so,I just started looking at the Gcode generated by Slic3r and noticed it set all my perimeters and infill widths to 0.58 even though I have a 0.4mm nozzle. I’d have to suspect this is part of the problem.
After tweaking those settings my print appears to be much better. However my beef is why in the world is it defaulting the widths to so much higher than the defined nozzle width in the first place?! Seems like a bug to me (maybe it is?). There’s no sense in making it so wide for new users who are just going to have gapping problems like this and then say Slic3r sucks. Not that I’m saying that. I actually really like it the more I learn how to use it. But it really needs to have better defaults for new users.
Yes, I realize that. However not all things are equal. And I’m not the only commenting on these gaps. Seems to me it should be a little more conservative by default.
Too small is better than too big by default for new users. Otherwise, the new user’s impression is, “Slic3r is crap, it doesn’t work as well as Cura” (not my viewpoint btw). Fortunately, there are some users like us who do dig deeper. Not everyone has that way of seeing things and move on quickly if they don’t understand that certain calculated defaults are potentially outside the abilities of their hardware.