Support

I read Dave Durant's Blog about Skeinforge Support and thought I would give it a try too, since the first attempt at the HTC Tripod Mount failed badly when trying to draw plastic on thin air.

The biggest trick is to enable the Raft module (code, pass, thingy) without making an actual raft as a base. This mans that the gcode generation is still "raftless" but you need to go into the raft dialog and enable Raft. Then the parameters are like Dave's blog describes.

The effect is to make a footprint that is equal to the shadow cast by a light directly overhead. The footprint is then extended upwards to touch the object. In the HTC Tripod Mount, the base is a square, and the footprint of the overhanging wings makes a couple of pillows to left and right as seen in this image.

Printing with Support.

But another problem reared it's head, the extruder drive is slipping on the plastic material. This leads to a very bubbly looking piece of plastic. You can see the first start in the foreground of the picture. I had to kill it because the plastic wasn't extruding.

I guess I should do the calibration procedure for the extruder feed. But what is that? The only ones I've seen are for the DC motor driven extruders (set the Motor Speed (PWM) between 0 to 255), and the Ultimaker has a stepper driven extruder.