6d ago

Printing fine details without the tool crossing the part?

I'm trying to print a small 1-walled part with fine details. If I just model and print it in PrusaSlicer, the travel moves cross through the middle of the part and leave strings. "Avoid crossing perimeters" does not help:

I'm playing with a really hacky solution, where I model the desired tool path in vase mode, and post-process the gcode to disable extrusion for straight walls at particular angles in the x-y plane. Here is the result:

This is effectively "vase mode with gaps" but my implementation is hideous. Does anyone know of a better way to prevent travel moves from crossing the part? Perhaps a different slicer or settings?

Edit: Here's a link to the STL: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6948297

3 comments

It's been a little while since I've printed anything that needed specific settings like this, but I'm pretty sure that Cura's combing/ avoid printed areas settings will do this for you. Though I don't have any experience with one wall thickness parts and this setting.
- Interesting, Cura does successfully avoid running into the part by default:
  If I disable "Avoid Printed Parts When Traveling", the result looks similar to PrusaSlicer.

I think the issue is with it being just a single wall. The slicer tends to have some trouble with that.
My first thought was just to model the return paths as well, making it a loop, print that in vase mode, then just cut away the unwanted parts. My second thought was to wonder whether there would be a way to use post-processing to set the extrusion to zero for those particular paths, maybe using the multicolor features, and thereby avoid printing the extra area.