Originally shared by Stephen Baird   Inspired by Brook Drumm 's  earlier post about

3D Printing
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Originally shared by Stephen Baird

Inspired by @Brook_Drumm 's earlier post about super small layer printing, and in search of a way to use up the dregs of a spool of PLA, I decided to see how the Bukito did with .01mm layer height.

…turns out it actually does ok, but if I were to print anything other than a spiral vase I’d have to really play with retraction I think. You can see that even one tiny error will compound and last for many many layers before the print recovers, only to flare back into a problem later. Even a small amount of excess retraction would probably be disastrous.

The surface finish on the print is interesting, too. It’s extremely raspy, almost like shark skin. Maybe that’s caused by the surface finish inside the nozzle becoming evident only at such tiny layers? It gives an interesting matte effect to the print, whatever the source.

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It took about six hours, yep. And it only went about 70% of the way through the print before I killed it because the plastic was about to run out.

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Yeah, it’s pretty crazy. Personally, I’ve only tested them down to 20 micron (.02mm) layers. There are really diminishing returns WRT time vs. quality beyond around 100 microns.

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There really are. The differences between .1mm and .05mm aren’t particularly noticeable without looking extremely close, and even the quality difference between .2mm and .1mm can be easily dealt with in post-processing… Unless you’re just planning on putting an unmodified print on display.

It’s an interesting exercise printing like this, but not something I’ll be doing too often.