Floating items  

Floating items

Hej folks,

Today I decided to give this Spinning Triple/Quadruple Ball Bearings a spin 😉
Put the STL in Slic3r set to 0.1mm detail, enabled Supports and a (2 layer) raft as suggested on the thingiverse page, sliced it and let the MK2 dance using black PLA at the default Prusa PLA settings.

Print started off promising enough, but once the printer went through the layer that included the balls things went silly. I stopped the print shortly after, due to the nozzle accumulating blobs of plastic where the balls would be. Print looked like this at this point: https://goo.gl/photos/CRyxcSxYt7GnRVFE8

Went back to the slicer to figure out what went wrong, and it appears to me that the balls have no support (why?) and therefore the first layers of the balls are apparently mid-air. Well, no wonder they get messy.
Any suggestions?

I gave Craftware a shot, which let me manually place supports under the balls, but I have no profile/config for Craftware and the MK2. Copied the GCODE for start/end from Slic3r, which gave me the first problem: no variable support there. So the pre-heat code has to be hardcoded. Fine.
Gave it a shot and tried printing, but after calibration, heating and the initial line it put out a few big blobs of what I guess are supposed to be supports and then tried to make a circle which didn't seem to extrude plastic at all: https://goo.gl/photos/tszeyxsm3Rmk9htX7 so I aborted this.

Any suggestions on how to proceed with either Slic3r or another slicer that works for this model? 🙂
Is Simplify3D worth it?

Thanks for reading!