Ok… So these photos are a week old… But FINALLY got this dragon printed! After 5 attempts, this is the first /complete/ print!
The red dragon is my best previous attempt, he was left in a public place for a few weeks and got dropped, so lost his forepaws and tail tip.
So I thought I’d share one trick at removing complicated prints from glass. I print using either Uhu or Elmer’s purple glu-sticks(stinky!) on a 3mm Borosilicate(‘pyrex’) glass bed.
Either let your print cool down to room temperature, or if your using Borosilicate glass(Not safe with soda-lime glass) fresh off the printer, and strait into a freezer(Dragons must be positioned facing away from icecream, or they’ll steal it). Then it’ll either fall off the bed, or come away very easily.
Don’t leave your print on the glass overnight being cool, moisture gets absorbed back into the glu-stick and makes it tacky again. If this happens, set your printer to heat the bed for 30mins first to dry out the glue again.)
Certainly looks interesting. As I just mentioned in another thread here the new slic3r experimental has vastly improved support material generation so I may give this dragon a shot using just that or perhaps simplify3d.
So far I’ve only been printing Adalindas
@raykholo this is the second hardest dragon I’ve found to print. I did it using slic3r 1.2.6. Yet to try 1.6.7, but it does look good.
This the challenge I hope to one day do:
(That’s the meshmixer surport version of the original. But yeah. Best have a well tuned printer.
I think you meant 1.2.7. Slightly better gap fill (so I read), much more stable gui.
I will get that challenge printing tomorrow. All my printers are of my own design so I’m extremely confident of their capabilities (the bed is completely stationary and the gantry moves in all 3 axes around it). No shaking bed means no print coming off. Also heated glass is awesome with an occasionally spritz of hair spray for small footprint models. Unheated cast acrylic bed works great too.
Anyways - I know that simplify could make the support-less model work for sure with its own support generation, but I may just print the Meshmixer version as is with slic3r support disabled. We’ll see what happens.
Yeah. I meant 1.2.6, 1.2.7 crashes on start on my machine at the moment. Running system updates to see if that fixes it.
But having a more stable GUI would be great. It does like to fall over a lot.
As for glass, I don’t like using hairspray as it stinks, plus the overspray gets on everything and it’s hard to remove. Glu-stick on a heated bed works /wonderfully/. Infact too well on PLA. But on ABS, with parts with simple bases you can pick them off the bed when it’s cold. And running the glass plate under the tap washes it all off back to clean.
The dragon was trickery. I haven’t had any problems with the bed shaking causing problems, but mine is just a Prusa i3.
I haven’t tried simplify as it’s not open source. I even avoid using meshmixer when I can.
I had 1 or 2 support pillars detach about half way up. The base of the wings is really thin (only 2 extrusion widths with no gap fill in between, and some areas even tried to do a single extrusion width)
Overall came out quite well, pillars snapped off easily.
