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Topic: Support Materials

So what settings do any of you use that give good results?  Seems like every time I use support materials, they end up fused to the model.  sad

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Re: Support Materials

Supports never break away perfectly and so you will always have some clean up to do on a design (unless you have a dual extruder and are using a dissolvable material for support).

Now with that said, the "quality" of your support choice matters on how much work you will have to do. This is almost entirely determined by your slicer, which is one of the many places that the stock XYZware software falls short. I normally slice with Cura, which slices well but it's supports leave much to be desired. Something like Craftware is going to be a lot better at this. Even slic3r which isn't as good as Cura for it's level of detail is still a better choice for automatic support structure, though once again unlike Craftware or Simplify3d, you can't manually change how the support works.

The last and perhaps best choice if you care to do the work is to add your own supports in a 3d modeling program, like Autodesk 123D. You'll get total control over the result and you can slice with whatever you wish and know how your support will work. This does take a lot more time and effort however.

Most importantly no matter which route you decide on, all of them have some sort of method that will allow you to print with the stock XYZware software except for Simplify3d which can print directly. Simply3d is the only software I've mentioned that has a cost, so you can experiment with the rest for free and see if you find a solution that suits you.

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Re: Support Materials

Simplify3D and using Pet+ filament you will get supports that break away clean and leave no evidence they where ever there.

Printing since 2009 and still love it!
Anycubic 4MAX best $225 ever invested.
Voxelabs Proxima SLA. 6 inch 2k Mono LCD.
Anycubic Predator, massive Delta machine. 450 x 370 print envelope.

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Re: Support Materials

Simplify sounds great, but I'm too cheap to pay $150.  smile

Thanks for all the info!

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Re: Support Materials

Increase the horizontal and vertical gap between the support and the part.  Do this in small increment until you reach a good balance between quality and ease of support material removal.

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Re: Support Materials

thanks.