Supports in cura

Airtent

Greets, 

My a5 is printing great except for when printing supports, they are rather tough to break off the print.

I have the latest version of cura and used the printer profile that came with the cura version on the usb drive.  After tweaking, I have the following settings:

Support overhang angle: 50
Pattern: zigzag
Density: 15%
Z distance: .2
Use towers: checked

Are there any other settings, or any changes to the above ones that would help in easy to remove supports? 

Godzilla32

Mine are hard to remove also. I havent tried tweaking the supports settings yet though so id be keen to know if anyone else has tips also.

Dave Price

Yeah, I got this problem too. Funny thing is, I'm using the same Cura settings as my previous printer. Only difference is that I was using 2.5 now using 3.5. There's a couple of "Hidden" settings that i unchecked, "Use Support Roof" being one and the next test print was slightly better, but still more support "welded" to model than I would like. 

There has to be someone out there that recommend the best settings to avoid this??

Dave

P.S. Should have added, the printer itself is printing fine and happy with the quality, but this is an unexpected problem - Help anyone??

Samuel Pinches

Hi Dave, sorry I don't really have any magical suggestions for easy support removal unfortunately. If you're using the zig-zg style there is a feature in the experimental section you may want to try, called "break up support in chunks". Apart from increasing the Z distance, I don't know what else to suggest.

Dave Price

Hi Sam,

Yeah, i had a go at increasing Z distance tonight and that seemed to work much better. 

Might have a possible solution to the A5 set up as a new printer, but want to run a few more test prints before I post the results. Will be back in soon!

Thanks for help, appreciated

Dave

sasa

Instead of traditional support options try experimental option - "tree support". They work fine, come off easily and look creepy good .  For minis and sculpts they are way better than traditional support.

Bed must be leveled very well or rafts should be used.

The thing below is printed with tree support on default settings

Dave Price

Indeed Sasa, VERY creepy!! lol

Was looking at the experimental stuff, but being a bit of tech thickie, didnt want to mess about too much. Currently trying something that I did with my Anycubic and running a few test prints to see if a hunch I have pays off. Will share after the tests

Dave

sasa

They were actually very easy: I ticked one box  to enable and not changed anything. So far success/failure ratio is quite good, no completely failed prints but when printing this one

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3036098

something went wrong in the beginning and fingertips supports failed. Since it looked like this

I discovered it only after support removal.

On the bright side, all small details (hair strands, horns and tooth tips etc) were printed great, despite the scale and support removal was 15 minutes only with no sanding required

sasa

Here is another attempt. Tree supports on default settings work great in most cases but fail for vertical points - like fingertips, canines etc. Slicing is also VERY time consuming for complicated models.

This is small version  (15 cm) of cave lion skull, printed with raft. 20 minutes to slice (on i7 rig), one day to print. Tried to scale it to max (35 cm) and slice  with tree support but failed.

Canines points support was definitely inadequate, both tips were knocked off. On the bright side support cleaning is 10 minutes business.

Here is Redit thread on improved settings