4 pegs, two different styles. Two are an “L” shape… I guess those are feasible maybe. But the other two are more like “U” shaped clips. My best guess without using a magnifying glass is that they might be 2mm along the longest dimension. Maybe 2mm tall also. Are those just going to come out as a mangled mess?
Has anyone printed anything tiny like this with precision, successfully?
Any tips for printer settings (or even materials) when I try this? I’ve done PLA and PETG keys so far, both worked great.
I’ll be doing the design in Blender, which I’ve had some very good success with so far, but that was with more normal desktop sized keys. This might end up being a super glue job, but I’m hoping to do better.
I did quite a few precision prints in the old days using 0.2 and even 0.15mm nozzles - stay away from anything below 0.2 unless your body and brain do fine without sleep…
There is detail and precision and then there is detail and precision…
The devil as always is in the detail.
Let’s ignore the possible issue of those fine details not getting enough cooling while being printed as you can always print a few caps at once.
Those clips that hold the cap are true pain in the behind.
You need a new print profile for very thin layers and a matching filament profile where the flow ratio and K-factor are precisely hones honed in for those thin layers.
In order to make those clips printable you will have to include some collateral damage.
As in adding a wall between them and a short one either side - with a tiny gap of course.
Not sure if Studio is smart enough to go from one end to the other if you force the order to nearest neighbour - never tried those things with my Bambu…
The two pegs I would print solid with just a dint in the top to help keeping the drill centered - assuming there is a required hole in them.
The rest should be no problem, just be patient with the print time…
You could even go below an extrusion width of 0.2mm if there is no way around it but this comes with a can of worms for the flow ration calibration and often with layer adhesion issues.
I’ve done tiny details with a .2 nozzle. You will want to go slow so the detail is precise… but not sooo slow that you have a melty mess. You will need cooling so that the tiny details don’t overheat and melt, but not so much cooling that the layer adhesion isn’t good. You will need to print hot enough that your tiny single-line extrusions have layers that stick together, but you will also need to print cool enough that your fine details are crisp not gloppy……
There are some good points… those clips may not need to be exactly the same design. They just need to be able to lock into whatever’s available. Maybe they can be slightly larger or a different design and still do the job?
@movingimage Yeah I think I see the problem - I need to do two things that are basically opposites. lol Or really, experiment with precise tuning to get it just right.
At least these things won’t use hardly any filament to iterate on.
That’s what I’m going to start with, certainly for prototyping anyway. This will probably take a lot of iterations if I get a working result.
Going to try a .2 nozzle (obviously) with the .06mm HQ profile. Will at least be fun to see how it does I guess, but honestly I expect to fail hard. haha…
X1C .2 nozzle, smooth plate (nano polymer adhesive which I think helps a lot with first layer quality compared to a glue stick), and I switched to the included .06mm High Quality profile in Bambu Studio. The only thing I changed was the Arachne wall generator. Didn’t even slow it down, just normal speed.
Oh yeah that’s probably the most important for this thread isn’t it. Maybe a little hard to see clearly here but these parts are so small… I mean I literally can NOT see all the detail on these things without magnification. Printing at insanely small sub-human vision detail levels… and somehow this printer pulled it off.
This is actually the first prototype, but I didn’t change anything about the clips and it came out the same.
I didn’t replicate the original button design exactly either. I was lazy and just put two of the clippy things on both sides without doing the other “L” shaped things for the other two… and it still worked.
Design was done starting from the default cube in Blender.
That’ll probably be the limit of what I’m crazy enough to attempt. I was at the point where I had to modify the model slightly, import into Bambu Studio, and see what it actually does after slicing.
This time I switched to the .06 layer high quality profile, lowered all line widths to .15mm, Arachne engine and of course .2mm nozzle with PLA.
Bambu Studio… seems like some bugs in there. Nothing I can’t work around after I know about them but geez. I had to split to parts after importing in order to color things, but the filament colors would never stick after selection in the left panel when I did that. So instead I have to split to objects, and then hit undo once, which does what split to parts is supposed to do.
And Studio keeps forgetting my printer too, I always need to go to Devices and reselect it. Maybe something to do with using Local Mode - annoying.
