3D Printing: problems with a tall, thin print

Just getting started with an A350 and attempting a tall, thin print: artificial-nose/nose back plate.stl at master · kartben/artificial-nose · GitHub

It gets about 70 to the top then the print falls over. Any recommendations on settings to keep it from toppling?

Rotate it horizontal so it’s not tall/thin.

Structurally the print will be strongest in the XY plane as the filament is continuous. Along Z there are filament layer boundaries and will be 30-50% weaker.

This looks to be a case part of some kind, you would want the strength to be along the long axes, so orient it with the large flat area down.

If that orientation introduces any unsupported overhangs then you will need to add support.

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This should be a negative indentation (about .2mm indented, perhaps), not embossed. This becomes unprintable in the flat orientation.

You’ll notice that bottom hole renders with no thickness in the github viewer. That indicates this model is non-manifold and has “deal-breaker” levels of triangulation errors. I ran this through a geometry checker and got this:

You need to figure out what’s going on with your CAD package to be able to export a quality model, as this is not guaranteed to slice and print at all.

These artifacts at the bottom also aren’t good, something exported weird here:

While you’re editing this model, make sure there are no features smaller than 1.2x your nozzle diameter or they will not print either (in this case, 0.48mm). It looks like this is very thin in some spots, so the slicer will ignore areas thinner than can be printed.

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Thank you for all the feedback. Most of it went over my head but I did manage to rotate the print 90 degrees and it printed just fine on fast print default settings.

I created some file handles in OpenSCAD and printed them vertically. Printed horizontally, the handles would split along the layer boundaries when a file was hammered into them.

The only real secret is to use a wide raft and supports - with lots of distance between raft/support and workpiece so that they can be removed.

If possible, you want to reduce movement of the Y axis, as that is what moves the build plate and can cause toppling. My parts were cylindrical so instead I reduced the travel speed to 35 mm/s. Retraction-on-travel/layer-change settings should have helped (ensuring the the nozzle is always clear by a good 1mm) but seemed to make no difference.