In this video I'm going to show you how to avoid this
and we'll go into this
and this
and this again, since it made such an impression last time. We're going to
cover a bunch of support strategies, and how to tune them, and what they're good for. Let's go.
This video is sponsored by PCBWay
I should start this video by explaining support. Support is when you have a thing that you're
printing, and it either doesn't connect to anything under it, meaning it's floating,
or it's going to be at too steep an angle from the previous part of the print. Those
are the two circumstances where you need to use support. You can get away with a lot though,
I've covered in previous videos how you can forego support in a lot of cases - but this
episode is about using it, not avoiding it. And using it to get neat results
too, the undersides. Because a lot of the time, supports leave an underside like this.
Which is the first topic I want to talk about - interface. Support settings in the slicer can be
confusing especially words like interface, but the concept isn't terribly difficult,
here's support without interface, look how few contact points you get, and the resulting print
lacks support because it's relying on the same density as the support structure - you could
increase the support structure density, or you could turn on interface. It's like a raft I guess,
to increase the surface area under the part. The denser the interface,
the more points of contact you have and the neater, in theory, your underside will be.
The downside? Supports become a lot harder to remove. And there's not a huge deal you can
do about that, either. Or is there? You see, a dense interface between two parts
will definitely try to fuse itself together, but what if those surfaces didn't bond well?
And this is the main point of this episode, to explore support
materials. Support materials are a second material that you can print as support,
and remove somehow. A good support material is one that can be removed without damaging
the section it's supporting, but also sufficiently sticks in the first place.
Now a lot of these support methods do need, or work better, with a multi colour printer.
I realise a lot of people watching don't have one, but they are becoming more popular,
and there's still ways, so stick around, pun intended, and I'll hopefully find ways
to support you, pun intended, even if you have a single nozzle printer. Pun intended.
So the classic support material is PVA, this stuff goes way back. You probably know PVA because it's
...well..PVA, it's the primary ingredient in PVA glue, unsurprisingly, and it costs about 30 pounds
for a 500g reel. The texture is somewhere betweeen dry pasta and wet pasta, and the colour is
somewhere between...dry pasta and wet pasta. The idea with this stuff is that it is soluble. You
can print with it as a second material, and then you can dissolve it when you're done. This stuff
has been around for so long that there's probably a million youtube videos about it, but to use it
you need a two or more colour printer that can handle it, which means the bambu AMS is out as it
can't handle it. I'm printing it on the IDEX here. This material is perfect for when you need to
support really awkward or even internal surfaces, I've designed a couple of pieces here - the first
one is a cube where there's a ring inside it, you would struggle to support that ring inside with
conventional supports. When dissolved hopefully this piece will look like one of those puzzles
where you have to get the ring out, but...you won't be able to get the ring out. Hilarious.
The second piece is three balls in a cage. I dunno, I just felt like it. The third one
is actually one of mz4250s d&d pieces, a particularly awkward looking dinosaur -
these are meant for resin printing, but we can give it a go with PVA. Oh and while we're at it,
why not do a dice. We'll come to this bit in a minute. And I'll dissolve them at the end,
this is my sneaky way of keeping you watching.
Before we continue though I want to show you this, this is a preview of what's coming in my
next non review video, I have designed this board to meet my needs for that video but
it's actually a general project board for ESP32 development, which if you're not into electronics
might not mean much - it's a microcontroller and that's all you need to know. You see an
ESP32 doesn't fit on a breadboard and this is the source of some frustration. I know
it does technically fit on a breadboard but you actually need to be able to connect these
pins to things and you can't. So what I've done which I'll go into next episode is make a board
that supports all the peripherals I usually use but also is configurable in case I need any more
later. Of course the reason I'm telling you all this is because of the video's sponsor which is
PCBWay, who obviously made this board for me. I am actually really impressed with how professional
it looks, and this is actually the first time I've used pcb manufacture services so it was
all totally new to me, yet I was able to figure it out pretty easily. With PCBWay you can choose
all sorts of options and colours and I chose green because it was fastest to produce and ship but I
have samples of other colours, as you can see you can put your own artwork on and that comes out,
you can see a preview, I found the whole process pretty undaunting, is that a word,
the opposite of daunting, and if you need support, hah, support, pcbway also has
customer support just a click away to answer questions. You can follow the links below
to check out PCBWay and try it for yourself. Thank you PCBWay for sponsoring this episode.
So, The other method of doing removable supports is something that seems to have
become more popular recently and that is using incompatible plastics. The idea that you can
use PETG to support PLA is becoming more well known, and...it is true. You can. This
technique works because PETG and PLA will stick together, but not with a particularly strong bond.
The thing about using these materials, and this goes for PVA too, and is often forgotten,
is that if you use them, you typically do not want to leave a space between the support interface and
the part. When you print with PLA you have to allow at least one whole layer, you can't do
half layers, unfortunately, between interface and part, and if you don't leave this, well, you're
just printing, and it will be fully meshed, you won't get that support off. But when you're using
dissolvable or non permanently binding, I don't know, I'm making up words now, support, you do
not want to leave a gap. This means of course that your support quality will be better. In theory.
I'm gonna put on screen now a sort of grid of what works with supports, at least as
far as I've tested. TPU is one you might not have thought about, but it's probably the most useful
of all because TPU supports are pretty much not a thing, if you print a TPU part with supports,
you would have to clip them off, but TPU will apparently happily just pull away from PLA and
PETG, but when Modbot tested this I think he found PLA to be the better of the two.
So, let's talk about bambu then, and this Support W. If you bought a bambu with an ams
then you get a reel of this free, if you have an idex you can buy it and use it of course,
there's polymaker polysupport either which I've heard might be the same thing. This is
literally just a slightly better tuned, I assume, breakaway support they call
it, I prefer my term, non permanently binding, because all support breaks away, anyway this
stuff is I think just a weird formulation of PLA, I can speculate, the MSDS of polysupport
says polyurethane, bambu's MSDS says exactly what I thought which is a mix of PLA and polyurethane.
You can't keep stuff secret when there's an MSDS, so basically it's half PLA and half TPU, who knew.
So what if you don't have a multi material machine? Well. One final point - and this
is important so I hope you're still here - The thing about these support materials, and this
applies to PVA too, or can, is you can use a lot less than you think you need to. If you use the
second material for the whole support then it's quite wasteful, especially on a bambu machine,
and of course unfeasible on a single extruder. But if you think about it, the only thing you need
to break away is the interface. So you can just use the support material for the interface. You
should be able to see how much filament poop that saves on a bambu. But also if you have
a single extruder, and you choose to do only one layer of interface, I mean you could even do two,
if your area you're supporting is flat like this example here, then that is two filament changes,
one to the support material, then one back again. I know it's not much consolation,
but it could get you out of a pinch if you really need it. The bulk of the time you'll want to not,
because your interface layer will be at all kinds of heights, but you never know.
So there you go, let's dissolve these PVA prints and see what happens,
and with that, thank you for watching.