I did another survey, I thought it would be interesting before I made this video to find
out what people know about vase mode so I asked my subscribers what they think the thickest
line width you can do on vase mode is, and I chose 0.6mm, I did this for a good reason
but we'll find out why in a moment. Along with the results. Yes, I am going to make
you watch to find out. Don't worry, this is good.
I feel like I'll be using the english pronunciation of "vase" in this video, I feel awkward saying
"vase" and I considered vaese, but I think that sounds oddly posh so I'll just stick
to vase and I'm sure you'll all know what I'm talking about.
So, fundamentally the problem with vase mode is that it's...fragile. Arguably it's a setting
that's useful only for showing off how fast a printer can generate an object, and has
little other practical use.
If you've watched my videos before you will of course know where this is going. Assuming
the thumbnail and title didn't tip you off. We're going to push this as far as we can.
I'll show you the survey results though first. This is interesting to me because initially
the 2x nozzle width was winning, then the first two options have got some votes later
on, so if I left the thing to run a bit longer it could well end up skewing further that
way.
I'm sorry to say though that if you answered either of the two first options you are quite
a bit short of the limit, though I don't blame you. The idea of extruding a line a lot wider
than the nozzle is unintuitive, although I did mention in my last video about the relationship
between nozzle width and line width, i.e. there isn't one, but go watch that video after
this one if you haven't yet, people seem to like it even though I hated making it. Took
ages. Oh well.
So where were we. These bins, I wanted some really strong actual bins for the office,
so I printed these out. Not only are they really useful and strong, but they took under
3 hours to print. Under 3 hours, AND they're pretty much full print area size for the ender
3. If you have done any full bed sized prints in the past, which I think most of us have
sliced them, looked at the literal days to print and noped out of it, well, to get something
this big in 3 hours really is only possible in vase mode. But look how thick they are
- it's hard to really show you how robust they are on camera but they are night and
day compared to normal vase mode.
And these were printed at 1.2mm on a 0.6mm nozzle. So yes, the 28% of you who voted for
2x the nozzle width are somewhat vindicated. But not quite. I didn't ask "what gives the
best output", I asked what's the thickest. We need to go thicker.
But before we do that, let's pause and look through the bottom of this bin. You certainly
wouldn't want to be throwing half empty cans of coke in here. We seem to have an interesting
phenomenon, and it doesn't make a lot of sense either. I get that we're forcing the slicer
to extrude much thicker lines than it wants to, but I can't see why it leaves so much
gap between them, I think it's probably either a bug or a case of "what do you expect if
you start putting crazy numbers in" issue.
I tried a few things to fix this - if indeed you want to fix it, for these bins I wasn't
bothered at all, even as a mesh the base is strong enough to hold a couple of kilograms,
I tested. But I wanted to try to solve it anyway, and I found two options, there's probably
more.
Option one is to put a raft underneath as I did on this model here. The key is to choose
say 3 layers, and make sure the raft extra margin is zero, and if you mess about with
the spacings, this is what I used, you get a much stronger output. Because you've set
the air gap here to zero you end up with a raft that won't peel off. It's a hack. It
works though so whatever, don't care.
Here's a small box with the raft method, this is 1.2mm line width on a 0.6mm nozzle, you
can't really tell that there's a raft.
Option two is playing by the rules a bit more, and changing the initial layer flow value
to higher than 100%. You might have to go quite high, and if you're running a low line
height you might have to change initial layer height too, to give the goo somewhere to go
otherwise it starts getting really hard to remove from the bed.
Which takes me to the next problem I saw, and that was the bottom staying on the bed
when you pull the model off. This is one reason to use glass beds which solves this, but there's
still a potential issue with the bottom coming off as it can be a weak point, the join between
the walls and the infill.
Again there's a solution, to raise the infill overlap percentage. I found 60% worked well
when using 2x nozzle width or greater.
Prusaslicer handles things differently, a sentence I seem to be saying a lot lately,
but yes, prusaslicer vase mode is not the same as cura it seems. For one, prusaslicer
gets very concerned when you start asking for thick lines. You have to keep confirming
that you know what you're doing which honestly gets annoying. But if you notice you can't
change the top solid infill width and you might think "who cares, I'm not printing a
top layer", well actually prusaslicer thinks you are, it seems to put it at the base. Now,
weird as it seems, I actually like this, because it means you get a good solid layer on top
of the oddly spaced layers that both slicers seem to do when you put huge line widths in.
It means the print doesn't have a see through base.
And yes you can do this in cura too actually, and it does work, so there's your option 3
I guess for sorting out that mesh...not sure why it took me this long to think about that
but there you go. That's the creative process for you.
So then, let's go thicker. This box was printed on a standard 0.4 nozzle at an eyewatering
1.4mm line width. As you can see the first iteration had a removable...well, removed
base, so the 60% infill overlap fixed it, and it's now quite well attached. The box
is pretty strong, I'd be happy with this strength.
Cura seems to break totally if you go higher than 1.4mm line width. Look at this. I actually
didn't follow my own advice and started printing this without checking the preview and I can
confirm that this is what prints, obviously I cancelled it but here's the bits from that
print. Luckily prusaslicer doesn't suffer from such a bug.
Here's a bigger one. Again, fairly strong. There's no way a standard vase mode print
would be usable at this size/shape as a storage container.
Still not thick enough though. How about this. Those of you who answered 1.75mm, well who's
laughing now? This is 1.8mm. This is actually a wider line width than the filament going
into the nozzle. Think about that. This is still on a 0.6mm nozzle.
Could you do this on a 0.4mm nozzle? Not sure. The only thing I suggest here is slow down,
a lot. If you think about what's actually going on, you're incurring a lot of pressure
on the nozzle and a lot of filament will be also passing through so the last thing you
want to do is remove the thermal energy from the heat block and nozzle and end up clogging.
If your extruder starts to click on prints like this then you can raise the temperature
to give you more tolerance to work with or you can slow down.
Interestingly on these thicker prints, you start to see some weird artifacts. When you
go above 2x the nozzle diameter you start to see these diagonal lines, and they get
more obvious the more above 2x you go. I can't really work out what they are, I haven't been
able to come up with a decent explanation as to what causes them, because they're diagonal
which makes no sense. If you have any ideas then comment below.
Unfortunately our game comes to an abrupt end at 2mm. This box did print at 2mm wall
thickness just fine on the 0.6mm nozzle but as you can see, it looks horrible. If you
just wanted an ugly strong box then you could still do this but this looks like it's as
far as we go.
Interestingly the next thing I tried to do was to swap to a 1mm nozzle and try the 2mm
box again. It does look better actually but still not particularly acceptable from an
aesthetic point of view.
But we should take a moment to appreciate that we can print at 2mm thick at all on these
printers, it's around 12 percent wider than the incoming filament, which is mind boggling.
But let's summarize what we realistically can do with good results.
If you're also thinking there's no point going larger than 0.6mm nozzle size then I actually
agree with you based on this experiment, this is definitely a conversation for another time
but yes...it seems like nozzles larger than this are quite redundant. Interesting.
So there you have it then. Extreme vase mode. I think it's pretty extreme.
Thank you for watching!