But you might want to wait with an enquiry until you can see the sample.
And as I said, I haven’t got the build capacity to print it in one piece so you might be better off printing somewhere else as some glueing would need to be involved when I would print the big model
The colors in the hub aren’t all colors I got btw…
Ok I’ll make a print of the most difficult part (the brim) up until one of the window lines and a few tiles are finished. No need to support the print files, I’m generating that myself so it’s printed specially printed to be easily removed.
This is the part in the slicing software view and how it looks on the printer, you can easily see the support beeing generated for the overhanging brim. This is designed to easily breakoff and break in itself so removing isn’t that hard.
The windows got support in them too.
The print status is at 6/100 layers for the 1cm print I’m doing on the first picture and at 42/100 on the second.
The main learning on my side: Pulling out the support from the windows is somewhere near impossible. So I’m currently printing a wall with two windows again without support material. This would probably be the strategy for the final print too then, prevent auto-generation of support material for everything except holding up the brim of the roof
Well, it is possible to pick out the support from the windows, but it doesn’t leave a nice result and it’s a very gruesome task, wouldn’t really want to do it for a whole tower
Cleaning up the roof however is pretty straight forward, just did a piece of that and this is the end result.
As you can see the layers are quite distinquishable with FDM. There is the possibility to do a acetone vapor bath to smooth the surface if the print is ABS. Otherwise the layers will always be there.
With a resolution of 100microns this is somewhere between Medium and High Resolution on 3D Hubs. As for the cleanliness I guess there are printers that do fare better on FDM. But the overall Texture will stay.
That’s what I was expecting. Coming from an SLS process the lines created by an FDM print (as small as they might be overall - there are printers that print finer than what I can do with mine and overall can create a cleaner print due to better ooze prevention) are just not as nice as the grainy look and feel from an SLS print where the part is always naturally supported by the not bonded material and thus has perfect finish all around with no supports needed and nothing to remove.
The only real advantage of FDM vs SLS is cost of manufacturing.
