Can anyone slice this model?

[Mjolinor]

As I said in the post I used Cura. There were no errors but it was at 80% size so maybe it missed the bad bits, I don't know.

Just download Cura, it's free and fairly small.

[bbinnard]

Well, I did try Cura (Ver. 15.06) - twice. And both times I had 2 problems:

(1) I could not find a way to set up the geometry for my printer

(2) When I tried loading the OBJ file Cura never came back from the "loading" message.

This is the log file Cura generated:

Exception in thread Thread-8:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "c:\dev\python34\lib\threading.py", line 921, in _bootstrap_inner
File "c:\dev\uranium\UM\JobQueue.py", line 114, in run
File "c:\dev\uranium\UM\Mesh\ReadMeshJob.py", line 33, in run
File "c:\dev\uranium\UM\Mesh\MeshFileHandler.py", line 31, in read
File "C:\Program Files (x86)\Cura_15.06.01\plugins\FileHandlers\OBJReader \OBJReader.py", line 33, in read
normal_list.append([float(parts[1]), float(parts[3]), -float(parts[2])])
ValueError: could not convert string to float: '\\'

[bbinnard]

A friend of mine was able to slice the model with Cura after performing a Netfabb repair, even though Netfabb said there were no errors with the STL file. SO I did the same thing - ran a Netfabb repair and saved the results as bot STL and OBJ format. Interestingly enough the STL version was smaller than the OBJ version: 19.87 MB vs 40.55 MB. I've never seen a situation before where the OBJ version was larger than the STL version of a model, but oh well.

At any rate I was able to slice the part with Kisslicer so I'm printing it now. Craftware failed to slice it, presumably due to the known bugs it has.

[Mjolinor]

I am using Cura 15.02.1, it is the latest version I can download without compiling it myself.

I set up another printer that would allow it to be sliced at 100% and it slices fine with no error messages, takes it a couple of minutes to slice and is a 29 hour print but no errors that I can find.

The Gcode file is 55 meg at 0.3 layer height and it 539 layers.

[bbinnard]

I stopped printing the part after a little more than 8 hours. Here's the result:

IMG_20150713_094723.jpg

I stopped the print for several reasons:

1. It was clear the slanted ribs were too weak to provide proper strength and support

2. I had a parameter error in Kisslicer that resulted in many strings and hairs; I removed most of them by hand for this photo

3. Even though I had a layer height of 0.200 mm the whole part looked rather rough

I broke off a couple of the ribs while using an Xacto knife to remove some of the hairs - even though I was being quite careful. I guess the moral to this story is: just because you can design something does not mean you can print it.

I've had excellent success printing more "solid" parts so it looks like I'll have to change my design ideas a bit to accommodate the limitations of printing in the real world.

[Bassna]

Honestly that model look's very printable to me. I would more thing you had issue's with your printer/slicer settings or something....

[bbinnard]

Well...feel free to try printing it yourself. If I'm doing something wrong I'd love to know what it is. I use parametric software to make my models, so I can create any number of variations.