Gaps In Slices
Hi. My partner and I own a company that makes 3D printed clay cutters. Our cutters must have a thin cutting edge in order to offer sharp cuts into clay for our buyers. We make our cutting edge 0.45 mm thick. We keep running into problems with gapping in our prints. I use Fusion 360 to design my cutters, and the design looks wonderful on there. When we upload our designs into the slicer, we often see big gaps in our cutting edge and this is very frustrating because it affects our product... we cannot sell a clay cutter with gaps to our customers! We just started our business last year and we know that we have a lot more to learn... that is why I am coming here. If anyone can offer ANY advice, we will gladly take it. This has been an issue for us and it is very frustrating when I spend a lot of time designing something for my business just to have the print come out unusable. Seriously, any and all advice is very greatly appreciated. I have attached pictures of what our slicer is showing. 
Prusa's default nozzles are 0.4mm and the default extrusion width is 0.45mm...
If anything runs thinner the extruder cannot print it. Worse, as non cardinal lines are laid down their position is approximated to the nearest stepper motor step - sometimes this will result in sections where the best approximation of the limits of the part are closer than the smallest extrusion possible.
Single strand edges are extremely fragile so even if printed they are likely to break. Printed layer lines are also likely to create a gripping surface that will hold and distort otherwise clean-cut edges.
Whilst a smaller nozzle might help a redesign might be in order.
Cheerio,
RE: Gaps In Slices
@baylie-robin
You'll want to turn off detect thin walls, and most likely want to start using a smaller nozzle 0.3 or 0.25 for example. In the mean time you can try adjusting the extrusion width for the 0.4 nozzle you working with currently. Some of your cutter designs may also accommodate Spiral vase printing making them truly one perimeter thick, at which point the 0.4mm nozzle should work fine.
With all this said, it is possible to print that thin using regular modes of printing with 0.4mm nozzles, but each model would require different techniques to make them work, where as the smaller nozzles should just work. The smaller nozzle will slow the print time.
Regards
Swiss_Cheese
The Filament Whisperer
RE: Gaps In Slices
Hi Baylie, did you find a solution to this issue?
I have tried changing the horizontal setting but it increases blade thickness too so it does not suit the sharp blade.
Any ideas would be super helpful.
Thanks