I watched several YouTube videos showing that you can use “sacrificial layers”, i.e. bridges to eliminate the need for supports. The one thing that blows my mind is that if I have a bridge over open space, then essentially the printer is printing in mid-air.
How is it achieved that the filament doesn’t drop down onto the bed?! Is that only possible with an additional cooling fan immediately Harding the filament? Or is that a matter of how fast the head is moving? What distances can the snap maker 2 bridge like this out of the box, and with what settings?
Sure, I can design test prints for that, but maybe some of you have some experience with Snapmaker specifically.
Use the Cura experimental bridging settings - the defaults on those work pretty well. It will go very very slow and intentionally underextrude so it’s under tension.
I’m wondering, can Snapmaker (running on Fast Print settings) accomplish bridging over a span averaging 8mm to 16mm?
I have designed a platter with lettering and a tree (think Gondor) cut into it (intended to be internally lit up by LEDs), and I’m using a “skin” of about 4 layers thick (~1mm) to hold the “islands” in the lettering in place, but my concerns about supports are over two competing issues:
I’d like to print without supports because digging the printed supports out of all those tiny corridors in the lettering would be a pain, and I’m confident the bridging could span those gaps. However, the tree trunk is another matter. I wish Luban had a support blocker feature like Cura does. I have created some profiles for the A350 in Cura, but I’m still struggling to get could printable GCode from Cura. About 50% of the time (or more) the extruder extrudes the skirting just fine, but then nothing after the skirts are done. When I revert back to Luban the prints happen as intended.
