Solid Extrusions?

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

I'm trying to design a simple electronics enclosure as a learning tool for Fusion.

Having watched a few tutorials, I've created the enclosure using extruded sketches, and all looks OK.

But, when I try to 3D Print the box the standoffs & their centre pins that will hold the enclosure cover in place, fail to print. Looking at the slicer, this is because the standoff and pin are both hollow.

I know I can fix this by adding supports to the print, but surely there must be a way to make these structures solid with Fusion...?

TIA,

[Beyondforce]

Hi @Anonymous,

Please create a screencast. Most of us are visual people, text description is nice but not good enough: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/design-validate-document/tutorial-how-to-install-and-create-a-screencast-step-by-step/td-p/6889690

Cheers / Ben
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[TheCADWhisperer]

Can you File>Export your *.f3d file to your local drive and then Attach it here to a Reply?

[Anonymous]

I've attached the exported file, and these screenshots show the issue. The standoffs and pins are exporting hollow, and collapse when printed.

They're fairly small with the standoff diameter at 4mm and the post at about 2.5mm

Thanks.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous In the design they are solid. But due to relatively low infill settings (as I see) there is no infill appeared under the column. You can try to increase the infill to check. Or move the model so so rare infill lines will be placed under pins.

For example, Cura starts fiil the gap N-layers before the internal pillow will begin. On good configured printer there should not be problem with it.

[JDMather]

Your part is solid, but I suspect you have a wall thickness set for your slicer to sparse print interior for saving material.

Also, your diameter of only 2.5mm is pretty small for printing a post 14mm high, but I think if you change the wall thickness to solid fill you will be ok.

[Anonymous]

This is my first post, but figured I would take a stab at it 🙂

Are you extruding the surface of your sketches, and not just the circles themselves (as in clicking on the surface, and not the outer line of the circle)? I am assuming the lower (larger diameter) portion of the post is completely solid, and the upper (smaller diameter) part of the post is partly hollow to allow screws to go into? Therefore, you would need to extrude the entire surface of a single circle for the lower portion, and then the surface in between 2 circles for the upper portion.

If you are doing that correctly, I would try setting your infill higher on the printer (in the slicing software), to try to get the posts more rigid. However, this won't make any difference if the extruded posts are indeed hollow in your drawing, as the slicer would not recognize it being solid from the drawing. I am still kind of a newbie to 3D printing, but everything seems to print hollow, unless you specify that you want an infill percentage.

Hope this helps, best of luck on your enclosure!

[Anonymous]

Thanks Matthew. It looks I was blaming Fusion when the problem lies with the slicer. I'm going to play with infill settings instead 🙂

[Anonymous]

Thanks Grandag, it never occurred to me to look at a cross section of the part in Fusion (to be honest I didn't *know* I could do that). I'll go play with my infill settings instead of blaming Fusion. So much to learn, so little time!

Cheers,

S.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply. The consensus is indeed that it's a slicer issue. I'll go play with the infill settings, rather than blame Fusion.  

[HughesTooling]

Does your slicer have a setting for minimum infil length? I've seen the same problem and needed to set the minimum length to 1.0mm.

Mark

[Anonymous]

Slic3r slicer, for example, has very helpful setting for this case: 

Solid infill threshold area - Small areas within the model are usually best off being filled completely to provide structural integrity.

It the area inside a perimeters is less than certain value slicer does full infill inside it.

And in recent versions of Cura there is a possibility to set different infill values for different areas.