Alfawise U30 - Tool cup + holder

thingiverse

I wanted a small cup with a diameter of about 25mm and a depth of 100mm for my needle file set. I ended up not needing it, but it was a good opportunity to practice using FreeCAD and creating things. Initially, I thought the cup would mount behind the top horizontal aluminum extrusion, but it works just as well as shown in the picture. This way, the files are easily accessible without having to reach too far. If you chamfer or sand the profile that mounts in the extrusion, you can slide the holder along the extrusion, and the little drawers I designed earlier (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3465501) remain accessible. I printed the holder so that the extrusion profile was printed first, against the bed, which required supports. The default Cura 3.6.0 support settings with an 8mm brim worked well for this part. It's also a good idea to use at least three layers of wall and top/bottom material to increase strength. The files are quite heavy due to their numerous number, but I don't see much bending occurring. I accidentally printed this part with a 5mm brim, fearing that the supports might fall off, but they held in place perfectly. I had to perform some "after-print-knife-chamfering" to get the profile to slide easily into the extrusion. In hindsight, it would have been better to print the design without a brim and use one only on the supports. The cup was printed with no supports and the round bottom facing upwards. I managed to do well without using any supports when printing four top layers. It's possible that my slicer (Cura 3.6.0) has some limitations, but it was impossible for me to get the walls printed with just three lines around to achieve a wall thickness of 1.2mm (three lines, each 0.4mm in width). I tried various settings but always ended up with the middle line of the wall being printed in short, non-concentric lines that moved rapidly and took a lot of time. To get around this issue, I used the thickness of just one line with no infill. The result was quite interesting: 0.4mm PLA followed by 0.4mm empty space in the middle and again 0.4mm PLA. This gave the cup a flexible feel but held together surprisingly well. For the love of all things good, I still have no idea how to get my printer to print just those three concentric lines/layer with no unnecessary traveling or shaking! It would hold much better if it were printed with a solid 1.2mm wall of PLA. Any tips would be greatly appreciated as I'm still new to this. AFTERNOTE: The problem mentioned above was solved by setting the Cura 3.6.0 option "Fill gaps between walls" to "nowhere." More information can be found here, which I found very helpful: https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/aa2o8p/avoiding_slow_zigzag_wall_filling_in_cura/