Challenging Prints / The Eiffel Tower

[maurice]

Has anybody managed to print the Eiffel Tower: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:22051
or this Voronoi Bunny: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:303842
on a LittleRP?

I tried the Eiffel Tower several times, but the four legs always fail, while the rest is perfect. But maybe this is caused by scaling the model down, so the structure of the tower is too fine to be stable enough anymore.
The voronoi bunny I scaled down too, but it was nearly perfect, except for one small hole in the structure.

As the Eiffel Tower seems to be a quite popular model, anybody succeeded printing it?
What are the most challenging prints you have done so far?

[goopyplastic]

I would suggest playing with higher cure times. The default cure time is a bit on the cusp of undercurring in an effort to get as much detail as possible. This generally works fine for models that have some mass to them, but something that is comprised of thing small sections it is likely you need to grow the part a bit more.

If the issue is happening at the transition between the base and normal layers you can modify the gcode manually to add some feathering between the layer and base time so that the cure time change isn't as abrupt.

You could also try placing the tower feet on top of some small riser plates so that the tower portion of the model is out of the transition area.

[maurice]

Yes, I know . I planned to post them as soon as I am in my workshop again. This will be tomorrow.

[maurice]

A lot of pictures of several Eiffel Tower tests, and the voronoi buny (it's not that easy to see the hole in the voronoi structure.)

[maurice]

more pictures

[maurice]

At the moment I am printing the Eiffel Tower (although with Maker Juice SubSF instead of MadeSolid), and I can already see the legs, and the are getting great.
So I guess the fails were caused by overcuring rather than undercuring. The overcuring made the legs stick to the PDMS, and as it is a fine structure, it was teared apart during lifts.

[cerriousdesign]

What kind of 3D supports did you use for the bunny? Did you use any? If you did, what program did you use, MeshMixer for the supports or just creation workshop?

[maurice]

I did not use any support for the bunny. And meanwhile I managed to print it perfect several times.

[cerriousdesign]

Thanks! I have a Voronoi ring I printed out, which printed out awesome, but Meshmixer suggested all these little supports which were really hard to get off and impossible to get out of the inside part of the ring.