Yeah, because the opinion on cloud computing of the CEO of a vendor that makes terrible software that looks straight from the mainframe era is really relevant...
Clones made in Draft can be resized in the data tab. This is super useful for creating offsets.
Yeah I'm aware of the resizable Draft clones. But in my case, it's not helpful: in the case of the letter R for example, if I shrink it, the outside of the letter creates a gap but the inside of the letter invades the shell's material. What's needed here is moving surfaces inward - meaning outward vertical features move inward and inward vertical features move outward (and horizontal surfaces stay put) which is quite different from wholesale resizing.
You insert this print as you would with a nut or bearing inserted into the paused print and continue the print
I thought that's what you meant. This is WAY too labor-intensive for my purpose: I print those tabs in batches of 256. I can't imagine printing 256 tiny lettering inserts and manually placing them iin all 256 shells when the print pauses. That's crazy!
Is this what Prusa does for their parts? They must be using slave labor or something. Then again, at the price their sell their wares, they can take a few minutes to manually insert parts into their prints...
If you have trouble with first layer crispness, print the lettering face up and use ironing to get a flatter crisper edge.
Face up looks very nice, even without ironing. The issue is, the shells have very thin (one line width) walls, and those would need support. That means carefully removing 256 supports for each batch of tabs, trying not to break the walls. Crazy amount of work. Not to mention, the wall's height needs to be quite precise, and supports usually screws up with vertical dimensions bad, at least for the kind of precision I need here.
Someone else mentioned a 0.2mm nozzle. They are not as slow as one might imagine.
The real issue is, this is the company's printer. It's used for printing jigs and things. I'm really trying to avoid changing how it's usually setup because I don't want my colleagues and I to change the nozzles several times a day. Also, my boss thinks the markings as I print them now are good enough - which is true enough - so I can't justify the expense of a smaller nozzle.
In short, I try to make the best of what the printer offers without modifying anything significant.
I would rotate the text 90 degrees so that it has the full length of the top tab
Not an option I'm afraid, as I have to fit two lines of text.
I have not, but I will today.
Make two separate parts in CAD. You can join them as separate shapes in a Parts Workbench compound or using the Mesh Workbench tools. Then upload the meshed file into the slicer. Empirically tune the gaps to suit your printer.
The letters are separate parts - well, bodies:
Basically I use the same shapestring to cut the letters into the shell and pad each letter as a separate body.
I thought about somehow pushing the lateral walls of the letter recesses in the shell outward to create a gap around the letter bodies, but I haven't figured out how to do that smartly in FreeCad. I have a feeling I should work on them as meshes, but I've never used the mesh workbench. Is this what you're suggesting?
Of course, I could also import the body in Blender and do that there.
Personally, I like to use manual inserts or layer changes. Print your text separately in one color. Recess the text in negative for a few layers. Then add a print pause where you drop the lettering into the designed voids and continue the print, letting the voids and bridging bond the inserted letters.
Wow I'll have to re-read that when I'm fully awake: you totally lost me there 🙂
If you design the 0,0 location of the parts so that they import into PS already aligned but as separate meshes, you can also use the elephants foot or other unique settings to manipulate how each section prints.
They do import as separate bodies that are aligned. I did try messing around with settings in individual parts, but it didn't do anything.
You're correct. A 0.2mm nozzle would certainly improve things. But it would also make printing those tabs unbearably long.
I wish my company had bought a 5-head Prusa XL: then I could have loaded black PLA and white PLA in two heads with 0.2mm nozzles, and a separate feed of black PLA in a third head with a 0.4mm nozzle for the rest of the parts that don't need to look nice. But... ours only has two heads and it's 0.4mm on both, because all the other parts we prints just don't need finer details.
I did. No difference whatsoever.
So the guy printed throwaway first layer that he filed off to uncover nice- (or at least nicer-)printed letters underneath? Interesting concept. Too much time to spend on my little tabs though, since I make them by the bedloads for our many cables, but I like the idea.
Thanks!
Yes, they're perfectly serviceable. I'd just like them to look more "professional" I guess, for my personal pride 🙂
So why not put the letters in the flat piece? That way you can print them either way up.
Good thinking!
In fact, that's what I did first: the markings were on the lids rather than on the shells.
The problem is, because the lids are dovetailed, they're narrower than the shells they dovetail into, so the width for the markings is reduced. meaning the letters need to be smaller, meaning they look even worse on the lids.
So I played with all kinds of settings in PrusaSlicer. Nothing changed anything.
The only things that did improve the outcome some was:
Forcing the letters to be printed first: then the letters are smooshed and bleed into the background instead of the other way round, which arguably looks better / more legible. Nothing to write home about though.
Dropping the first layer's height to 0.1mm (the other layers are 0.2mm high): that improves the letters a bit.
Dropping the first layer's height to 0.05mm: because the first layer is so thin, it becomes kind of translucent and the wider white letter beneath it sort of show through. The net result is that it drops a kind of gaussian blur onto the lettering, which actually improves them - especially at a distance.
Other than that, there's just nothing for it. And half of the suggestions I got concern other slicers, and I couldn't find them or equivalents in PrusaSlicer. Oh well...
I guess that's as good as it's gonna get.
Good tip. I shouldn't have too much problem with adhesion with the XL, since it's a coreXY printer. But then, I left 256 parts printing at work on Friday, and this is what the printer cam shows today (I'm at home at the moment):
So yeah, even printers that don't shake the bed can have adhesion issues.
I'm printing those little cable pull tabs on our Prusa XL printer. In the models, I added markings to identify the type of cable, printed directly into the tabs with a different color PLA loaded on head #2.
The problem I have, as you can see, is that the white letters are "overrun" by the back surroundings.
I have to print those parts face down: when the first layer is laid down onto the bed, the black surrounding is printed first with head #1, leaving empty space for the symbols, then head #2 comes in and fill in the spaces after the head change:
The problem apparently is that the black material gets "smooshed out" on the bed and partly fills in the void, and then the white PLA doesn't have enough space to make nice, sharp letters.
It wouldn't be a big problem with larger letters: they would just look like they have fuzzy edges. But those letters are 3.5mm in height and only two 0.4mm-wide lines at the most, so it's basically all fuzziness.
It doesn't happen when I print face up. But then I have to have support for the tabs' walls, and since I print those things by the hundreds, I'm really not keep on having to remove support on hundreds of tiny parts. So it's not an option.
I tried printing slower but it doesn't change much of anything. Not to mention, again, I have to print those things as fast as possible to print as many as possible overnight.
And of course I can't increase the size of the letters: they're as big as the tabs' size will allow.
The letters are readable enough, but they don't really look great. Is there any trick to reduce or eliminate this? I was thinking of trying to print the white first with head #2, then the black with head #1, but I can't find an option in Prusa Slicer to invert the order in which the heads are used.
I'm printing those little cable pull tabs on our Prusa XL printer. In the models, I added markings to identify the type of cable, printed directly into the tabs with a different color PLA loaded on head #2.
The problem I have, as you can see, is that the white letters are "overrun" by the back surroundings.
I have to print those parts face down: when the first layer is laid down onto the bed, the black surrounding is printed first with head #1, leaving empty space for the symbols, then head #2 comes in and fill in the spaces after the head change:
The problem apparently is that the black material gets "smooshed out" on the bed and partly fills in the void, and then the white PLA doesn't have enough space to make nice, sharp letters.
It wouldn't be a big problem with larger letters: they would just look like they have fuzzy edges. But those letters are 3.5mm in height and only two 0.4mm-wide lines at the most, so it's basically all fuzziness.
It doesn't happen when I print face up. But then I have to have support for the tabs' walls, and since I print those things by the hundreds, I'm really not keep on having to remove support on hundreds of tiny parts. So it's not an option.
I tried printing slower but it doesn't change much of anything. Not to mention, again, I have to print those things as fast as possible to print as many as possible overnight.
And of course I can't increase the size of the letters: they're as big as the tabs' size will allow.
The letters are readable enough, but they don't really look great. Is there any trick to reduce or eliminate this? I was thinking of trying to print the white first with head #2, then the black with head #1, but I can't find an option in Prusa Slicer to invert the order in which the heads are used.
I'll look into Orca Slicer. Thanks!
I wouldn't bet on that: I compiled PrusaSlicer from source and it really does require OpenGL 3.2-only features. I mean it's not like just an unfortunate dependency. Disappointing considering the time it takes to build this monster 🙂