Fat Dragon Printing

I watched the most recent Fat Dragon 3d printing video, in which the guy (Tom Tulliss) stepped through his Cura settings and explained what each of them does, and why he chose the settings he did.

I'm not quite as ignorant as I was a couple of months ago, but nevertheless I found it quite illuminating. I thought I'd give his Ender 3 miniature-printing profile a try, to see how it compared with my own hodge-podge. I used one of the Fat Dragon skeletons as a test subject, as they print very reliably without supports.

The mini has been given a very light airbrushing with a pale grey primer so that it will photograph, but no other post-processing.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the profile, from what I see here. Improvements over my own profile are slight, but definite enough to encourage me to keep using it. Next I'll try it on a 15mm tank model (the other thing I print a lot) and see how it serves for that purpose.

Regrettably, at the time of writing YouTube has gone doolally, so I can't link directly to the video. I'll try again later.   The video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqEWl51s9Rw

Later....

As I said I would, I tried the same profile on a 15mm tank, in this case a Hungarian Toldi II of WWII.

 At first glance, it looks OK. I certainly got much, much less stringing than I do with my own Cura profile.

However, all is not well. Not completely, at any rate.

Shell separation

In several places I got significant separation between the shell walls and top layers.

That may be for a number of reasons; for a start, this is printed at a much lower temperature than the recommended range for eSun PLA+ (195° rather than the 205° to 225° recommended by the manufacturer). Also, I think there's a shell overlap option in Cura that it might be worth looking at, if I can find it again.

I shall have to make a little test model to dial in this stuff, something that takes significantly less than 5½ hours per iteration to print.