Supports - The Usage and Purpose of it

I got an request by my classmate Roman, who is also involved in the 3D world like I am, (he's also blogging! - Link to Romans Blog) to print something for him. To be more precise: a 3D scan made by him, of himself, remodeled and adjusted by him, into a bust of himself (sounds kinda selfish, i know, but anyhow :P).

Here you can see his 3D Scan/Model, already loaded into the Simplify3D Printing Suite:

As you can see the scan went quite well and you can a lot of details. Now it's my job to print it as good as possible so details are still preserved.

If you are planning to print models like the shown above, that has steep overhangs or unsupported areas, there are serveral things you need to keep in mind and be assure before you start to print it.

Apart of finding the right temperature, an calibrated and leveled printing plate, you also should add Supports to the areas which have angles greater than 45 degrees or who are unsupported by no material below that area. Why greater that 45 degrees? Because it's said as a general rule, that most extrusion-based priners can support overhang angles less than 45 degrees.

Supports are thin, break-away structures that are just simply added to your model, either automaticly (if you tick that option) or manually by you, the user.

If you have an Dual Printer: It's quite commen that you print the Supports with the second extruder. Doing this has the advantage, that you can easily distingush between the model and the added Support. You save material and the job of the main extruder is only to print the model itself. But it could also happen, that some dots of the support filament are left on the model.

Eventhough I have a Dual Printer, this time I will only use one extruder who does both, printing the model and the Supports.

So let's start and add the Supports to the 3D Model:

To find the Tool that allows you to add Supports manually, you need to click on the last Button in the toolbar, which is next to the Model Preview (see Picture left). It will open a window called "Support Generation".

The window is divided in three different sections: Gridded Placement, Manual Placement and Save Support Structures















In the 1st section you can define the resolution of the supporting pillar/column that will support you're desired area and the maximum overhang hangle.
Based on these parameters you could now automaticlly add pillars to your model, confiming with "Apply based on overhang angle"






If you would like to add columns manually, click on the button "Add new support structures" in the 2nd section. You know can add pillars with moving the mouse to desired area at/next to the model and confirming it with a mouse click.

To remove a missplaced/not need Support, click on "Remove existing supports". You now remove, instead of add, the clicked columns.






In the 3rd section you can "Save Support Structures". I didn't take a look at this, I might do this later.

After adding/removing Supports to your model. You can anzalyize your Model in the Modelling Preview and can determine, if your model is ready to print. If so, click on "Prepare to Print!"

Print Preview
You are now, in the Print Preview, where you can take a look how the estimated way of printing looks like. You can also check if your choosen print infill is to much or okay. You can always change this, with going back to the Modelling Preview and changing this with slider "infill in %".
I choose an 9% Infill and a Extruders temperature of 230°C while the heated printplate had a temperature of 110°C.

In the Print Preview you can also nicely see how and where the supporting structures are placed.

Result:

On the left you can see the printed model with Support structures and on the right, the finished without.

If you are interested and would like to know how my colleauge scanned himself (and other persons) checkout his Blog!

Nozzle Calibration

Since we are finished with Leveling the Build Plate, we are now going to calibrate the nozzles of the 3D Printer.
The purpose of Calibrating the nozzles, is to find and adjust the best alligment of the dual print head. To start the calibration program, we need to navigate through the main menu of the Wanhao Duplicator 4 3D Printer until we find the option "Calibrate Nozzles".

After confirming "Calibrate Nozzles", the Extruders and platform are getting heated up to 230°C, for the Extruders, and 110°C, for the printing platform. 

 

When the right temperature is reached, each of the extruders are printing a series of 13 lines in the x- and y-direction of the platform. Your task now, is to find best nozzle alignment by determining which line in the x-direction and y-direction is aligned the best.

Different results of Noozle Calibrations:

left: bad result of Noozle Calibration - right: good result of the Nozzle Calibration

In the left result I would choose the line 6 in X-direcetion and line 12 in y- direction. On the right I would choose either line 2 or line 1 (Y-direction) and line 6 (X-direction). (Source of the right picture: Link)

When the calibration programm is finished and you think you determined the best aligment it's always good to make a test print.

Here I printed an 4x2 Lego Brick by wizard23 from thingiverse.com

Leveling the Build Plate

Since we didn't get that good results with the Dual Calibration Print, I said I should tweak the printers nozzles better. But before actually doing that I thought when I'm already calibrating and tweaking, I could level the printing plate, as well.

So let's get started...

What we need for leveling the printing plate:

• a normal sheet of paper and/or business card...
• and time... lots of time... (depends, not always but unfortunatly sometimes :/)

To actually initate the process of the leveling, we are going to use a leveling programm which is already on our Wanhao Duplicator 4 3D Printer. To start this leveling program, we need to navigate through the printers Navigation Panel, with the buttons right next to the LCD Display.

To get from the Main Menu to the point "Leveling Printer Plate", you need to use the down button, until you see the point "Utilities", enter it and look for desired point. After confirming "Level Build Plate", the printer head starts moving towards the printing plate and then stepwise to most right, left, front and back positions of it.

Push DOWN Button until you see "Utilities"

Choose "Level Build Plate"

While it is in one of those positons, you need to slide the sheet of paper between the extruders and the printing plate. Now you need to adjust the wing screws underneath the printing plate to get the desired and needed distance. 

2 of the 4 wing screws underneath the printing plate

To find the right gap, you must thighten (or loosen) the 2 wing screws, at the edge where the print head currently is, until you are just able to move the sheet of paper between extruder and printing plate. The best method to do this, is to move the sheet of paper back and forth/left and right, while you tighten/loosen the screws.To assure that you chose the right screws, you can the LCD Display. It will always tells you which 2 wing screws you need to adjust.

Once you checked every location (front, back, left and right of the plate) the printing head moves to the moddle of the plate. You can now, confirm your leveling of the plate, with a hopefully, plane bed with the right distance in the middle.

Congratulations you are done with levling the plate! :) Now you can print a test print or can continue with calibrating the nozzles. 

If the result of your print doesn't is promising and you still have  the problem that the extruders are still to far from the printing plate, you need to level the printing plate again.

Calibration of Dual Printing

Like I promised a while ago, will I start now with my session with printing 3D Dual Prints.
For a goal I set myself to print a good looking "Pet Monster Valentine - Heartless" from thingiverse.com (Link: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:17309)

But before printing something "out of the blue" and I'm not statisfied with the print itself in the end, I first try to calibrate and tweak it my printers settings as good as I can. Therefore I continued looking on thingiverse.com and found this Dual Extrusion Calibration Model:

As you can see on the picture, the uploader need to have a good calibrated printer to get such a nice clean result of this print. This or something close to this, is something I would like to achieve before actually printing the Pet Monster Valentine - Heartless.

All in all I made three test runs todays with the Calibration Model. These are my results:
#1 Test:

Regarding the settings, I didn't changed anything and let the printer software Simplify3D choose the prefered seetings for the Wanhao Duplicator 4. The temperatur for the extruders were 230°C and for the heated bed 110°C. Additional to that I choose to print it with a raft and not directly on the heated bed.



The results are accaptable in my point of view but I thought better results needs to be possible.

Some points that didn't went that well in this print were:
- There were a bit oozing on the side
- In the end of the printing of the blue part, it extruded to much filament and it goes into/over the black part
- The edges are not that well either, to much filament was extruded in the corners and it bends out.


A so called "purge/wipe wall" would be the suitable be solution. With this technique the non-used extruder is building a "wall" where it wipes of the overproduced filament.
I was looking for this option in the entire Simplify3D Printing Suite, but i couldn't find an option to add something like this. A solutions for this problem would be the change of the printing software for e.g. to "Cura" (where i actually need to change the currently running firmware of my printer) or "Makerbot", which has definitly the "wipe wall" option. After a little while i found the workaround to build a wall out of the "skirt" that are as high as the printed model and i gave it a second try:

 As you can see it build a "wall" out of the skirt. The downside of this is, that you can only wipe off one extruder - the one who making the skirt.

Some points that didn't went that well in this print were:
- The oozing got better on way better on the black part (which is probably because this was the color who was building the "skirt wall")
- The "ending" of the blue part is still there
- The blue corners went actually worse














Trying to solve the new upcoming and old problems i changed the temperature of the extruders from 230°C to 220°C and did a Noozle Calbration with the programm of the printer. After this I started the 3rd and last print, again with a "skirt wall".

 The results of this print were that:
- The oozing got better in the blue part aswell

- The Corners were still bad
- The same is for the "Ending" of the blue part which goes into/over the black part

To solve the last two points even more tweaking is needed, especially with noozles.

The Comparison with every test print:

I continued looking for additional information to the workaround with the "skirt-wall" and found out that it used to work to make to skirts, one from each extruder, to wipe the material off. But actually Simplify3D itself removed that option in an later update.

After a little while and more research on the internet i found another option or "dirty hack" would be more precise, where you print to extra coloums or models in the same height of my actual print to wipe of the overproduced filament.

I found this solutions here: http://www.forum.simplify3d.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=2075#p8128

It's a smart idea and workaround, but what i really don't understand why Simplify3D doesn't have a "purge wall" like many other printing software has...

Anyhow my next tasks for the Dual printing is giving a try to the MakerBot Software and maybe to try the "Dirty Hack". Also I'm planning to tweak the extrutision of the noozles better.

...getting started with my BA2 Blog

Hi my name is Tobias and I'm a Mobile Computing student at the University of Upper Austria. This semester i got the possibility to work and write about my Departments new 3D Printer, the Wanhao Duplicator 4 Dual Extruder.

I'm totally new in the field of 3D printing but everybody starts small and expirtise rises with explorating and trying until perfection ;) Therfore i'm looking forward to explore the possiblities that 3-dimensional priniting offers. 

After some meetings with my adivsor we came to the conclusion, that I should put my focus on the Dual Extrusion Technique (the possibilty to print with 2 Colors)  and the Calibration Arrangements you need to set to get the best printing results.

I plan to blog weekly or atleast every two weeks about the things i did with printer: which objects i planned to print, which calibration settings i set to get the best result, which problems occured, how i fixed those, etc

I maybe will also do some small excursions with writing about topics, that are related to 3D Printing, but we will see how it goes ;) 

...finaly getting started with presenting the Equipment I'm able to use:

The 3D Printing Software I'm going to use is Simplify3D. (Currently Version 2.2.1 but I will update soon to Version 2.2.2).

Hardware: The Labotories PC which is connected to the 3D printer has an Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 2.80 GHz, 4 GB RAM and runs on Windows 7 Enterprise 64bit.

And the most important thing is, suprise - surprise, is for sure the 3D Printer. As I mentioned before, I'm using the Wanhao Duplicatior 4 3D Printer Dual Extruder. The Printers Firmware is at the moment at Version 1.0.

Some of the awesome Technical specifications the printer has are:

• Single und Duplex Druck - You can print models in one and even in two colors!
• High Printing Resolution - The printer has a Resolution up to 100 micron!
• Price - It only costs around 850-900€ !
• Filament Materials - Supports a lot of different materials e.g. ABS, PLA, Nylon, etc
• and many, many more features!

(Concering the factor that my universities labotory of 3D-Printing is still in progress and keep on growing (hopefully with a lot of remarks and help from my side) I'll most probably need to update the list from time to time) 

You can look at the results of my prints here:
-- To be added --

Some ideas and topics i would like and will mention and blog about in the future are:

• Overview of the Printing Software Simplify3D
• Single and Dual Extrution
• How to calibrate the Wanhao Duplicator 4 3D Printer Dual Extuder – Best Settings
• The purpose and usage of the "Raft"
• Comparising and Information of the Printing Materials ABS and PLA
• Other possible printing materials
• etc

Feel free to comment or sending me messages with further ideas and topics you would like to know and might be interesting to explore in the world of 3D Printing.

- Tobias