3D Printing Intricate Parts Using Figure 4 PRO-BLK 10 Material
The Figure 4 PRO-BLK 10 is a pretty strong and versatile material. Which means sometimes removing supports can be a challenge, specially for complex geometries. To make things easier we added some really nice support features to 3D Sprint, our plastic additive manufacturing software. Today I printed a pretty intricate pendant on our Figure 4 Standalone 3D printer in office. Nothing is more intricate than jewelery designs. I was pretty amazed to see how easy it was to break away the supports. Also the sharp pointed supports hardly left any mark on the surface. The thickness of the pendant was 375 microns (0.375 mm). That’s around the thickness of five strands of human hair.
To be clear, the material used for 3D printing jewelery patterns is not PRO-BLK 10. Its Figure 4 JCAST-GRN 10. Its engineered in such a way that its castable, needs much leser supports and is brittle enough so that supports can be broken off easily. I intentionally printed the pendant in PRO-BLK 10 to test the 3D Sprint supports on stronger materials.