Eliminate Supports
Support material:
- Creates waste
- Increases print time
- Requires cleanup
- Relies on slicer settings
During my time in university, I noticed a lot of engineering students designing parts without considering printability and most obviously, without minimizing the need for support material.
A good printer can print overhangs of at least 30° (between the part and the print bed) and even a bad printer should be able to print at 45°; you should leverage this to eliminate sharp overhangs wherever possible.
Short bridges don’t require supports. While maximum bridge lengths differ between machines and filament, around 50mm seems like a good limit to set.
Where supports simply cannot be eliminated, they should be designed into the model intentionally. Intelligently designed supports can use less material and be cut or peeled off cleaner because as designers, we can utilize a printer’s ability to bridge across short gaps. They also guarantee others can print your models in the exact same way.
Compensate for Accuracy
The physical limitations of the 3D printing process itself can affect the accuracy of parts. These can be worked around through various techniques.
For internal perimeters that need something to slide into them, a printer will inevitably create a radius at sharp corners. Just as you’d fillet any sharp corners for other traditional manufacturing methods (such as CNC or injection molding), it’s often easier to get more reliable fits by adding even deeper rounded features.
Slant 3D
Slant 3D is a 3D print farm company and their YouTube channel is an incredible resource for product designers to learn how to optimize their designs for mass manufacturing:
- Printer/slicer agnosticism
- Reliability of manufacture
- Efficiency of manufacture
- Aesthetics of products
- Durability of products
- Food safety of products
These requirements also coincide with making models to share with others like for opensource projects or paid designs.
Printers can Pause!
Every 3D printer can be programmed to pause at a certain layer.
This can be used to embed hardware such as:
- Magnets
- Nuts
- RFID tags
- Weights
But it can also be used to embed other printed parts. This can be used to eliminate supports or even make multimaterial parts (without a multimaterial unit or a toolchanger).
Pausing can also allow manual filament changes for multicolored prints (on single filament printers) if the colors are separated horizontally.
While using the pause layer function does make a model slicer dependent and require human intervention, it enables so many designs that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. It also potentially makes your design more accessible to people with cheaper printers (such as you and I).