Have you ever used wire printing in Cura? It's an experimental feature and
produces some really interesting results. It looks like I used a 3D pen to
produce this but I didn't. I did this on a 3D printer. I'm gonna try out several
different printers and show you how this works on today's Filament Friday. This
episode of Filament Friday is brought to you by these patreon supporters. To try
out this wire printing I'm going to use this spider-man bust that I found on
Thingiverse by user Berlin Rockz so I wanted to test the print first and this
is the print at 75% of the original size. So I downsized it a little bit, and I
printed this on my CR-10S pro. Now I gave this a weak review when I first
reviewed it and it was mainly because of the Auto level but I've since put on an
actual buildtak sheet that buildtak told me to try and it works great and
then I lowered the sensor to just two millimeters off the top of the bed. Just
adjusted the screws and lowered it like a lot of people suggested. And man
what a difference. I'm getting a lot more consistent first layer and it sticks
still a little bit too much so I need to tweak it from time to time but overall
it's been pretty consistent and the print quality; I've been getting great
print quality off this. In fact this is at a 0.28 layer height using
my profiles and it's as good a quality as I get at 0.2 on my CR-10. Now this
is like $200 more but it runs quieter with the TMC drivers and the print
quality is really good. So once you get that Auto level fixed and working right
it's definitely a really good printer. So I'm changing my tune on this guy a
little bit. Here's a close-up of the print. It's not perfect by any means but
0.28 layer height, this is a pretty good print. I'm really happy with the results
I'm getting here. But now I have my basis. Let me show you how to use the wire
printing to print the same model on your printer. Here's the model loaded in to
cura 4.0 on my Mac. I'm using Creality CR-10S pro machine settings and
my magic 0.28 profile. 0.28 layer height 0.4 line width, 5% infill, 205° and
I'm using my Filament Friday filament red. When that sliced it says it takes
just over 5 hours to print. But it took more like six. Now wire printing is down
here under experimental. If you don't see it, click on the gear and in this search
type " wire " then you'll see wire printing. Check that box, hit close and
wire printing should show up under the experimental menu. To wire print
just check the box. And reslice. Now you notice it takes a
lot less time: two hours and two minutes is what it says. Roughly half or maybe a
third of the time but you can't preview it. The preview doesn't work with the
wire printing. Now instead of printing this on the CR-10S pro because
it was actually printing the bust when I did this. I printed it on my CR 10 mini
and I got a good camera angle of how this works. So let me show you it so how
this works, and this guy is about 2/3 done, is there sections that are popped
up like Z hopped and then once those are all in place it draws a line connecting
all of them. Kind of creating the top of the layer. And then once it finishes that
it'll stop and start the Z hop motion to make the next layer of wireframe. So
here it's just about done and once it hits this end point, now it starts making the
next layer it goes up and down and makes these triangular or sawtooth type build
area. It goes up and down and up and down. Now if you've got a sensor like the
CR-10S pro head, it occasionally it would hit the print. Now it wasn't hitting hard
enough to knock anything off. But it was hitting it where the CR 10 mini here was
clearing pretty well and some of these just don't exactly stick perfect and
some of them do. So it's really a variability and that's what gives it
that look like it was made with a 3D pen. Let me show you a close-up of this thing
in action. Here it is finishing that layer that's connecting all the
triangles and now it's going to start a new one and it goes back and then
forward. It's really interesting how it does it and then from there it starts to
go straight up and then out up and then out and you can see that some of them
stick really well and some of them not quite so. I might have needed to raise
the temperature just a little bit but it seems to be working
well. Now I believe you need a fan, the fan is blowing on this and that helps
the filament stay in place and a better fan than what the CR 10 has may help
because you can see there's one that didn't really stay in place so that's
where you start to get flaws in the print. So you might be able to do a
better job if you have better cooling but this is really interesting to just
watch how the does this and I wouldn't want to do this by hand so let the
printer do it. Here's the same bust but at 50% so it only took an hour to print
these guys but I did it on Ender 3 and Ender 3 Pro and CR-10S pro.
Each one printed with some flaws but overall pretty good results. Removing it
from the bed actually became the trickiest part of this whole print. Now
this one's on the CR 10 mini. This is the one I just showed the close up of and I
used my painters knife, it's part of my Filament Friday tool kit, we'll have more
of these very very soon (tool kits) but I was able to slide it under and just
slowly release this thing. And it's very fragile bottom. I'll show you in a minute
why the other printers didn't quite work as well as this Glass will really worked
well. But that I could remove it and grab this thing and it was surprisingly
strong. I mean you can crush this but it's pretty solid and how this is
put together so I'm really impressed with how good this turned out. And this
is the 75% size this is actually the first one I printed on the Ender 3
and I had the bed a little bit too close. I was printing something else I've had
really tightened the bed down so the spacing was a little too tight and when
I tried to pull it off it just it pulled apart so I had the bed way too close. But
it showed me how critical it was to get the bed just right for this type of
printing. Now I tried to use a raft in Cura
to give me a nice solid base but wire printing seemed to just ignore that
setting. So I had to re-adjust the bed and then I switched, I was running out of
white, these are all Filament Friday filament colors. So I printed one on the
pro and one on the Ender 3 regular. And the regular, I still didn't have the
bed right but it was better. The pro I had that one adjusted perfect and this
thing is smooth that came right off and these are both really good prints.
Red one came off the CR10S pro and it's the same 50% size as the ones that
are on the Ender 3 but this one is definitely a little more fragile than
those black ones and it even can separate here at the bottom. And I can
squish the head a little more and the difference is a setting in Cura. What I
tried once I started playing with these. I want to try a different line extrusion
or extrusion with and see if that would work with the experimental wire
printing and see if it would make this stronger. So let me explain what I did
there. Before I explain that, here's the two black ones from the Ender 3 and
Ender 3 Pro and then a red one from the CR 10's Pro. Tthose are all 50%, this
one is 75% that was printed on the CR 10 mini. Up close like this you really
don't get the effect as if you stand back and look at it but I wanted you to see
up close how this thing looks. It's interesting kind of a zig zag puzzle. It
almost looks handmade but it's not, it's printed by the machine. But now let me
explain the extrusion width and how it affects strength. I have two prints here
one is the red that was on the CR 10 Pro and here's a black one that was actually
printed on the Ender 3 and notice I can squeeze the red one more than I could
squeeze the black one. Here's the difference. So here's the bust at 50%
inside Cura, everything else is pretty much the same. The wire printing, 0.28
layer height o.4 layer width and then like I said while you're printing
and then when I sliced it it took 1 hour and one minute was the estimate and this
is how I printed the red one then I went back on the black one and I changed the
line width or extrusion with 0.6 so it's going to extrude more
plastic. I sliced it again it said it would take the same amount of time which
was kind of strange but look what happened. 0.34 millimeters is
the width on the red one and 0.54 is on the black one so it worked in
Cura it did add some extrusion and that's why the red one is easier to
squeeze. And the black one is a little bit stiffer. I ended up printing two of
these; one on the Ender 3 and one on the Ender 3 Pro. In both cases I
use the same extrusion with 0.6 and they're both a lot stronger. I did use
the 0.4 on this 75% size on the CR 10 mini. It
printed really good but it's definitely not as strong as those black ones. so I
think that extrusion width actually helps even though I couldn't do a raft.
It did accept the higher extrusion width at least it appears that it did. And made
the prints stronger so I think the next step maybe is to try this out with a
larger nozzle and the perfect printer to probably do that on is my Artemis back
here because it prints really big and it's already got a bigger nozzle. It's
got a 0.5 nozzle and see if I can do the extrusion trick and get that bigger. I
can even put a 0.8 on that thing real easy and it prints a lot faster. And
that's the beauty of this too, is it prints so much faster than a solid model
but they're different they're totally different the fact that you can see
through this one makes it really an interesting effect. I can see making a
really big one like 200 percent size or 150 percent size in that thicker
extrusion and maybe be a good display for a Maker Faire or something like that.
So this is an interesting effect totally different than anything else I've done.