Interesting article on experience printing with very small nozzles.

3D Printing
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1

Interesting article on experience printing with very small nozzles.
It is clear that even if the small nozzle give fine details, the increasing time required for print, may be not a worth in the average of the user prints.

I would like to extend this concept to the following idea::

  • what about a DUAL EXTRUDER but not with different colors/materials, as used till now, but using same material, but different nozzle/filament sizes (e.g. 0.5mm, 0.3mm).
  • Do it exist any slicer capable to uses different nozzles sizes on the same print generating g-code formed by different nozzles commands using the small nozzle for perimeter and big nozzle for infills parts?

To be clear, I would like to have the slice using the small nozzle for perimetrical lines that will form the fine details, and the big one nozzle for all inside infills to speed up the print. I know that it will need to do several layers, but it should be able to fill up at higher speed.

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Slic3r can do this already (use different size nozzles)

3

I’ve made 0.3mm nozzles. They work but they jam easily unless you have very high quality material.

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@John_Bump Sure… and the smaller the harder. I had very little success drilling //manually// 0.2 mm holes, as they resulted in ~0.3 mm nozzles anyway! Which in turn is hard to set up properly in the software :stuck_out_tongue:

5

Yeah, I had to do the small nozzles on a high speed lathe, and it was very tense work. The print speed rises as the square of the radius, so when you get that small even small prints just take forever and that’s if you don’t have a debris jam. (Putting very fine wire mesh down in the hot end right in front of the nozzle helped, until that had fully jammed with debris.)

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I though an ever better logic to have a GREAT speed and HIGH quality
!
Basically the rule is : big nozzle layer height = 4 * small nozzle layer height

This means as example:

  • the Small nozzle (0.2mm hole) will have a layer height of 0.1mm
  • the Big nozzle (0.5mm hole) will have a layer height of 0.4mm

Well, it is simple: the slicer will create ONLY 4 periferical perimetric layers of 0.1mm one on top of the other, no fill performed by the small nozzle, neither by the big one.
Very fast.

Then the Big nozzle, will do the infill at 0.4mm height. The plastic will align with the existing parts as it were just part of the same layer at 0.4…
The slicer should check the ALWAYS ensure that the top layer have plastic below for angled parts at 0.1.
You should have a perfect high quality, high speed layer :slight_smile:
I hope to have well expressed the idea and logic.

It is just a matter of change the slicer code.

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Hi @ThantiK , do you know if Slic3r further handles dual layer heights (b/c of the two nozzle diameters), as described by @Roberto_Coli ? Else indeed some work is left to support a 0.2 mm + 1 mm nozzle setup as they just cannot share a unique layer height (which would defeat the purpose btw)