What Are You Printing Now? By Christopher Addy Find that perfect balance between print time and quality to get your prints finished faster. There’s an old saying that if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, a 3D printer is a Swiss-army knife of a tool. Once your brain gets going, you want to print everything: from stuff to put around the house, to gifts for family and friends, to a part that will finally fix that thing your wife has been begging you to repair. It’s almost as if you have a hard time thinking of anything you can’t print. How much does layer height affect print times? Let’s start with a 20mm cube, a common test model to check for calibration and accuracy. I ran this through the slicer software, adjusted only the layer height, and calculated the print time for each resolution. Here are the estimates: .3mm – 16 mins, .2mm – 21 mins, .1mm – 34 mins You get pumped up, get your printer all set and ready to go, find or create a part, start the print and…. WHAT?! 7 hours? …for this? My goodness. I’m not sure if it was ignorance or my ‘but I want it now’ mentality, but I was blown away at first that print times were much longer than expected. So, what can you do to decrease print times? There are a couple of things you can try, but the short answer is this: sacrifice a bit of the quality. The fastest and easiest way to reduce print time is to increase the layer height; in other words, decrease the layer resolution. Most of our prints are done at a resolution of .2mm (200 microns) with an infill density of 20%. A higher resolution is going to increase your print time while also increasing the details of your model. A lower resolution will decrease your print time at the cost of a loss of detail. You can also adjust the infill percentage to decrease print time, but beware; too little infill can cause problems with your model while printing, such as warping or reducing the strength of the part. 30 www.cadlearning.com And here are the actual print times: .3mm – 16 mins, .2mm – 21 mins, .1mm – 32 mins Let’s look at another model, a Moai statue, at these same three resolutions. For a .3mm layer height, the software calculated a print time of 1 hour 40 minutes, for .2mm, a print time of 2 hours 4 minutes, and for .1mm, a time of 3 hours 28 minutes. Actual print times were: 1:42 (h:m) for .3mm, 2:05 for .2mm, and 3:25 for .1mm