Re: Transparent Filament Advise
Thank you Justuce with sharing your process. I did some research on these vinyl resins. Sounds very promising.
Re: Transparent Filament Advise
Yes. Most of our setups are machined and we use an extensive amount of polycarbonate, acrylic and glass tubing (side issue - wish 3d printed glass was a reality) but I'm looking at customizing setup that would be best if I could cad and print myself.
Re: Transparent Filament Advise
I have some clear petg filament that I'm experimenting with. So far the best transparency I've achieved is with an extrusion temp of 265c and bed at 80c within an enclosure. Also, increased extrusion multiplier to 1.1. Transparency is not bad but using a rectilinear infill pattern, I'm getting cross-hatching. I've tried to disable but I can't find a way to do it. I then made an attempt to outsmart using 180 and 360 angles but those tries also failed. Continued to cross-hatch. If I could get the infill to use the same angle, I believe better transparency would be achieved.
I'm hoping I might get some suggestions. Oh ... and this is using Prusa's Slic3r 1.41.3 edition.
Re: Transparent Filament Advise
I have some clear petg filament that I'm experimenting with. So far the best transparency I've achieved is with an extrusion temp of 265c and bed at 80c within an enclosure. Also, increased extrusion multiplier to 1.1. Transparency is not bad but using a rectilinear infill pattern, I'm getting cross-hatching. I've tried to disable but I can't find a way to do it. I then made an attempt to outsmart using 180 and 360 angles but those tries also failed. Continued to cross-hatch. If I could get the infill to use the same angle, I believe better transparency would be achieved.
I'm hoping I might get some suggestions. Oh ... and this is using Prusa's Slic3r 1.41.3 edition.
Try concentric infill?
Also, try cranking your extrusion width up to something stupid large, like 200% nozzle diameter (0.8mm for 0.4 nozzle). It'll reduce the number of interfaces. 🙂
Re: Transparent Filament Advise
I'm not quite following about increasing the extrusion width? Would this be telling the program that it's a .8mm nozzle when it's really only a .4mm? Also, the concentric circle didn't work too well. The rectilinear is giving the best results but the cross-hatching is dispersing the light and reducing transparency.
Re: Transparent Filament Advise
the extrusion width is the target width of the laid down trace in a layer. It should always be larger than the nozzle size, when printing infill, to make sure that the melt is adhering well to the layer below (it should ”tack“ well).
When printing bridges none of that matters as the extrusion width will always be slightly smaller than the nozzle size – otherwise it just wont bridge.
When you use very large extrusion widths you might notice ripples forming in the layer. This can happen when your melt flow becomes turbulent in the nozzle or you have irregular friction on the tip of the nozzle. Cleaning the nozzle thoroughly might help. Increasing the temperature or reducing print speed might also help a bit.
So far i have not found any infill pattern that is really transparent. Your best strategy might be to keep the walls thin to reduce distortion or to infuse them with resin.
Re: Transparent Filament Advise
the extrusion width... ...It should always be larger than the nozzle size,
No that is not correct. The extrusion width can be less than the nozzle diameter and still produce acceptable results and can work very well under the right conditions for some models.
Almost all of my prints have an extrusion width of 0.4 for perimeters and 0.5 for infill with a 0.4mm nozzle. The layer height should not exceed about 80% of the nozzle diameter.
Peter
Please note: I do not have any affiliation with Prusa Research. Any advices given are offered in good faith. It is your responsibility to ensure that by following my advice you do not suffer or cause injury, damage…
Re: Transparent Filament Advise
the extrusion width... ...It should always be larger than the nozzle size, when printing infill,
No that is not correct.
Almost all of my prints have an extrusion width of 0.4 for perimeters and 0.5 for infill with a 0.4mm nozzle. The layer height should not exceed about 80% of the nozzle diameter.
Peter
You missed the part where I wrote that this only applies to infill. This is about infill because that is where the transparency problems come from.
Re: Transparent Filament Advise
You missed the part where I wrote that this only applies to infill. This is about infill because that is where the transparency problems come from.
I did indeed miss that. Apologies.
Peter
Please note: I do not have any affiliation with Prusa Research. Any advices given are offered in good faith. It is your responsibility to ensure that by following my advice you do not suffer or cause injury, damage…
Re: Transparent Filament Advise
I sure appreciate everyone's advice. I didn't know of the width setting. I'm finding I have sooo much to learn about these printers and their settings. 🙂
However, none of the changes I tried using slic3rpe were satisfactory. It very well could be my limitation of knowing the program but it seemed the predominate problem was the infill cross-hatching that I couldn't bypass. I ended up installing Cura and that is giving the very best results. With this slicer program, I'm able to define the angle for the layer so that all repeating layers use the same angle. Like slic3rpe, I can define any angle but to my eye, best results came from using the default 45 degrees. With Cura I can tell it what angle for beginning layer and for the overlaying layer with the setting [45,45]. With this setting, there remains a visible 45 degree print impression that I'm interpreting as micro-air bubbles but there is no cross-hatching.
I really didn't want to install and learn a new slicer program but I couldn't figure out how to do it in the non Prusa edition of slic3r or the Prusa edition. In any regards, for now, what I found best for achieving transparency is to use Cura.