Printing at 0.6 extrusion width

In your example if things were perfectly calibrated you'd end up with two lines that had a gap between them.  We know that in practice that wouldn't be true.  However, as the number of perimeters increase that gap becomes more difficult to eliminate throughout the entire print.  I have played with this concept a lot myself and have come to the conclusion that the zig/zag is a necessary evil if you truely want your prints soilid.  Now a better way to do this would be if Slicer could spiral it's way from the center of the print to the outer edge in one smooth action.  This would be a feature I would love to see added.  Most everything I print is solid and circular items like pulleys would be much quicker to print if Slicer didn't separate out inner and outer perimeters and then tie them together with solid zig/zag infill.  Instead it could just start in the center and spiral out like it does with the perimeters only keep working its way all the way to the outer perimeters.  Spiral is not really what is happening its one separate circle at a time you get the idea. 
All you can do is play around with it some until you come up with settings that work for you and your designs.

It would be right in a perfect world where the printer was calibrated to that .48 wall thickness.  Changing the nozzle diameter setting doesn't actually change the diameter of the nozzle. Just the distance between the paths the nozzle follows.  Of course we don't live in a perfect world so for certain things what your suggesting actually works for others it does not.  Keep us posted on your findings.  I used some extreme's for testing and slowly worked back to normal.

I know what you mean.  Your changing these settings.

And to a certain degree that will work.  However,  if you set the extrusion width to 2mm what you will get is two lines that center out about 1mm apart and don't actually touch one another.  So you are limited by the actual diameter of your nozzle,  the amount of expansion and how wide you can squish it out to.  With a .40 Nozzle the widest I could ever achieve (in actual printed width) was about .9mm's  and that was only on the bed.  After that first layer there is some serious over extrusion that's going to happen.  Even that can be worked around but in the end I reverted back to the tried and true formulas everyone else uses.  Either way it is fun to experiment with and learn the affects of certain changes.

essentially we are saying the same thing other than there will be a physical limitation of the nozzle itself.  At some point (each nozzle will be slightly different) you will reach a point that the lines won't connect.  In the software you are really telling it two things.
1. how much filament it should push through
2. the tool path to follow
so by telling it that your nozzle is bigger than it actually is you are also telling it to follow the next path slightly farther apart.
I have also noticed that this all changes on the condition of the filament itself.  Filament that is full of moisture seems to expand quite a bit. Where as good dry filament will only expand roughly an additional 20%  which is where we get the .48 that you see used for a .4 nozzle.

As far as the settings above... Yes those are what I use but I have a .60 nozzle and change sizes routinely depending on the job.  With the bigger nozzle you can really start to see the effects of changing those settings.  Notice I have it at .70 and it really should calculate out to .72.  That just doesn't work with out some serious over extrusion problems.
I say have fun with it and learn some things along the way.  Maybe you can teach the rest of us a thing or two.

Hmmm, it definitely doesn't need to go that extreme on width ha.  What i was concluding is that making the width just 1.5 times the nozzle diameter gives it an extra footprint of squish throughout the print.

My theory is that at .48, with the .4 nozzle, since you only are squishing the sides out .04 it doesn't get that as good of contact.

Leaving the nozzle diameter the same at .4, change the extrusion width to .6.  Since it now has .1 squished on each side, I would think the extra plastic its being told to extrude should put more down force from the center out to better help layer adhesion.

I agree, there's so much to just the program itself.  I'm having an awesome time trying different things and trying to figure out what actually changed and why.  I really appreciate the input ward!

I'm really glad there's such a great community for bouncing and sharing ideas.  I'll keep playing with it and testing some more.