The tiny part for my printer I needed finally arrived and I have set off on the first print of our prototype.
I started with the aft firewall section. Here you can see the layer bridging that I was talking about in my last post of this series. You can see how the infill support the bridged layer. Fo this part I also increased the bottom layer thickness to 2mm as our rear motor is going to attach to this part.
This part came out really nicely, if a little heavy. I think the increased weight is due to the slicer filling gaps between some of the walls that are close together on the highly sloping part. This can be adjusted in the Cura settings, but for now it's ok.
The next part I printed overnight was the main fuselage body. It requires a 250mm z axis. For many printers this will be too big but for this prototype it is fine. At a later stage I can slice it smaller for small print beds.
It took 14 hours to print and came out nicely foe the most part. I did find a print defect to show you though. When starting a new layer there appears to be an under extruded section at the beginning of each layer.
There are two things we can try to do to stop this. First up, if we are only printing once part at a time we can reduce the retraction at layer change since stringing inset a problem. Secondly, we can adjust the retraction extra prime amount. I'll try a value of 3mm to begin with. Fortunately, because of the double wall design, this prototype part structurally ok so I"m going to move on to the next part.
