Hopefully I didn’t reinvent the wheel here and if this another post on this topic, please link here so I can ask the Mods to merge this into that post.
This post was inspired by an unrelated YouTube video where the YouTuber was promoting a dedicated mouse scroll wheel he had design. The video was irrelevant to this topic other than the person showed that they were struggling with getting smooth boundaries between their 3D printed mouse puck and the support materials. He said he resorted to using a magic marker as a barrier. When the print reached a certain point, he paused it and colored in the area of the support that he wanted to “stick less”. This got me curious so I tried it out.
The TL;DR version: Much to my surprise, this actually worked.(sample 4)
Filament: PETG
Model: Just a disk primitive in an assembly with a cube acting as a base. The disk overhung the cube and required support.
Click to Zoom
-
Sample 1: This is using my favorite technique whereby the slicer settings were set to 2mm base patter and max top and bottom layers(3), Top and Bottom interface spacing of 0.3 and XY distance of 1mm, which works well. You’ll see a clean break with minimal clean-up of supports. This is my go-to technique for geometric shapes and as you can see, the supports snap off clean.
-
Sample 2: Default settings. This did NOT work well at all. The material did not come away clean and required cleanup.
-
Sample 3: This proved the concept but as you can see, the support material was blocking the model bottom rendering poor layer adhesion.
-
Sample 4:
This is the goldilocks zone. By applying magic marker on only the inner portion of the model and leaving the edges clean, it allowed for good layer adhesion.
Conclusion: I think slicer support modifications are better way to go but in a pinch, this could be made to work.
Other note: The marker material can be cleaned off with either acetone, IPA, or simple sanding. I used a standard Sharpie as my marker, which uses toluene or xylene as its solvent. So that too could be used to clean off the material.
Here’s the model if anyone wants to play around with it themselves.
Magic Marker support blocking test.3mf (35.7 KB)