Just to be pedantic, it’s 0.2mm NOT 0.02. Here’s what the manual actually says:
However, when the filament of the support interface is also the body filament, it’s not recommended to be set to be 0 but about 0.2, or the support structure will be really hard to remove *. The following are the values of top Z distance and their results:
I posted this elsewhere but will repeat here since it’s probably more relevant in this thread. I recently had to print something to support a long concave structure which is somewhat a torture test and my results:
PLA with gap. Inconsistent support and rough yucky surface for this print. In other prints, it’s fine.
“Support for PLA” with no gap. Impossible to remove which ultimately made it even worse than a rough yucky surface. Happy to give my spool of this away.
PETG with no gap. Some parts could be removed - other parts left color or little bits I could not remove. So this is feasible if I were using a dark filament but not suitable with light colored PLA. However, still better than “Support for PLA”.
PVA with no gap. Everything came off after easily soaking in warm water for about 4 hours. The surface is nearly perfect. It’s smooth and mostly (90%) matching the expected contour. It’s expensive but with some care the amount that gets used is pretty low per print.
@BambuLab Bambu should ship PVA as the free sample instead of “Support for PLA”.
No-one suggested to use 0.02 - we suggested adding 0.02 to the default figure, or to the layer height.
A post was merged into an existing topic: PSA: Quality tools can make all the difference
Curious if anyone has tried any of the other brands of Support Material? I just saw several on Amazon.com, including UP Fila, Polymaker, YXPOLYER, & some others. I haven’t tried the bit that Bambu provided with my P1S/AMS yet as I haven’t had any problem removing supports from the projects I’ve printed in PLA and PETG so far.
I usually use Bamboo lab support filament and so far I am very satisfied. I have separated it quite easily from all my models I have printed so far.
I found PLA Support material was easy to remove if normal support structure is used versus tree support. Tree support has bits of support here and there and leaves tiny bits of support material stuck in the model. Where normal support creates an entire sheet. If support Z offset is set to zero the results are really good. I also found using PLA as PETG support and PETG as PLA Support material seems to work just as well if not better (limited test runs, not definitive).