The printed part came out nicely, but the support material was arduous to get out of a cylinder walled by very thin vanes. The vanes began to break off, which I expected, but hoped wouldn’t happen. I am printing in a way that is not optimal for this printer.

Here’s the result. (Well, almost. I broke some of the vanes off on purpose after the part became useless.) 

(Hey, I almost accidentally made a Turbine logo! :-)

So this morning I set the part up to print upside down and watching it was fascinating.

Here’s a video of the first bit. It’s not time-lapse. Feel free to zip around:

Here’s a video of the part as the vanes are about two inches tall. What I find interesting is that when the head disengages from any given vane, the vane wiggles. But note how perfectly vertical it is printing, with no extra support – just the thin vane it’s printing.

Here is the part fresh off the printer. See how printing it upside down removed all need for support material. Almost. There is some needed now because at the bottom there is a peg, and the area surrounding the peg needed some support.

The black (lower quality) ABS plastic leaves fine hairs between the parts, but for the most part, at .2mm and Normal mode, it’s printing quite nicely. A brush would remove the hairs easily. They are spider-web-thin. (I’m holding it in a glove because I was trying to remove support at the top with sharp tools.)

Let me tell you now why I have to redesign this part:

It’s too flimsy. I cannot hold it hard enough to remove the support material without breaking the vanes.

So I’m redesigning this section.

I’m a bit stubborn. It would be incredibly easy to design the part so where the vanes stick out of the body, the body too is black. (And yellow for the lower vanes) but I want to do this right. So now I’m going to redesign the vanes with a central core, and then build the body with vertical teeth (much like the separate vanes) but the teeth will be thicker and stronger. And I’ll design it so the vanes will slip down a hollow cylinder, but stick out of the red body.

In theory.

And now I printed the yellow vanes (in the old system) to see how they would print. Getting the support material off was a bit challenging, but I only bent one vane. Looks fairly good.

Here it is still on the print bed, before removal of any material.

Here it is with the black vane part just resting on the yellow.

This is fine for test-fitting, but I remodeled the whole thing to work better, and be stronger, I hope. I’m about to print the updated mid-body section to see if it all works together. I’ll have to re-print these too, but these current versions will at least help me see if they will fit into the body section.