I’m mostly making functional parts and am collecting tricks to make stuff strong and light. I just discovered one I thought I’d share, even if it’s old news to some…
I have a larger part that has a smallish handle and I’m trying to make the handle as strong as I can (given dimensional constraints) as well as a strong attachment to the part. I mocked something like that up below: the bigger box represents the larger part and the three elongated pieces represent three different ways to attach a handle:
The left blue handle is simply added (merged with) the larger object. The middle orange handle is a separate object adjacent to the larger object. The right green handle is larger and penetrates into the blue object, which has a cut-out for it (that’s important). Here’s the bigger object alone showing the cut-out:
I exported a STEP file that has the three parts (main object, middle handle, and right handle) and then in Bambu Studio / Orca I chose “split into objects”. That now allows me to adjust the properties per object:
For the handles I set 100% infill aligned with the main axis of the handles and for the main object I left everything pretty std. Looking at the slicing:
What you can see is that the left handle, given that it’s part of the main object, is sliced just like the main object. You can’t control it independently.
The middle handle can be controlled independently and I set it to 100% rectilinear aligned infill to make it strong but it will fail at the attachment point to the main object, because there it connects to the weak stuff over a small surface. The right handle nicely carries the 100% infill into the main object and adds some additional wall layers around it from the main object. It’s connection to the main object is much stronger than either of the other two handles (and I could have carried it further in or even all the way to the opposite side).
Hope this helps others!
Obviously adding gussets, fillets, or whatever you call them around the base of the handle where it meets the bigger object is also a good idea, the two are not mutually exclusive…
NB: you can achieve the same effect using “modifiers” in the slicer but I find it pretty difficult & tedious to position the modifiers and only simple shapes are readily available. The nice thing here is that depending on how you design parts you already have the component objects in your model, so as long as you don’t merge them all together you can take advantage of that with minimal effort in configuring the slicer.