Easy Print Monitor Shelf

thingiverse

This is a remixed version of http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1114319 to make it easier to print. The original model results in the slicer drawing countless tiny hexagons on the print bed, requiring numerous extrusions/retractions/wipes over short distances. This can cause the extruder to skip or grid the filament - a printer torture test that I experienced firsthand. Even disabling retraction didn't produce satisfactory results. This version eliminates the original hexagon-patterned shelf and replaces it with a simple solid flat shelf. "But the pictures show a hexagon shelf!" That's correct! Instead of relying on the model to draw a hexagon pattern, I used the slicer's "Honeycomb" infill option. See the print settings below to see how I made it look exactly like the original despite being a solid block. Also, letting the slicer draw the hexagon pattern as infill results in significantly reduced print time and about 9 million fewer retractions/wipes. Those hexagons in the picture were extruded as single lines with very few retractions. Print Settings Printer: Original Prusa i3 MK2 Rafts: No Supports: No Resolution: 0.2mm Infill: 13% Notes: If you want the shelf to look exactly like the original, set your slicer (I used Slic3r) as follows: Fill density: 13% (you'll have to type it in) Fill pattern: Honeycomb Fill angle: 0° (so it lines up with the sides) Top layers: 0 Bottom layers: 0 My shelf was printed in Inland Black PLA (the cheap stuff) with the little arm/nut parts printed in Prusa Rapunzel Silver PLA. If your slicer supports it, I'm sure the shelf would work just as well with Grid, Triangles, Stars, Cubic, and "3D Honeycomb". Avoid Hilbert Curve, Archimedean Chords, and Octagram Spiral unless you go with solid top/bottom layers (aka a solid shelf without holes). How I Designed This I simply used Blender. I imported the model into Blender and scaled the default cube to fill the space of the original hexagon shelf. It took me about 30 minutes - mostly because I'm a Blender noob and had some trouble connecting edges together properly after deleting the regular hexagon part (I had to do some searches for things like, "Blender merge vertices close together" haha).