Fine mesh Chainmail

thingiverse

This is the smallest and most compact chainmail I have managed to print reliably so far. It is identical to the chainmail found in https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2611564 printed at 56% size with a few adjustments made to prevent it from sticking together. See video at: https://youtu.be/i20ylD4Nh9E Getting this to adhere to the bed is crucial. There are over 2000 pads on the full-size STL, and they all need to stick perfectly. I have found that bookbinder PVA glue works best for me. It grips well and remains tacky for days. It tends to move out of the way on the first layer so you can achieve a mirror finish when using a glass bed. It lets go easily with warm water and a single-edge razor. I used Cura to do the slicing (the standalone version, not the embedded one). It has many more settings and does a great job of not running over pads it already printed. It's essential to fine-tune the retraction settings. With no retraction, stringing hopelessly sticks the links together. Set retraction to be enabled under all conditions (the default is to skip short jumps). Also set the retraction length to something like 0.5mm (default is 6.5mm). This greatly increases speed and reduces the chances of jamming the extruder. First, print the test pillar STL and get the settings right so there's minimal stringing and fusing. Next, print the small hex pattern and make sure that goes well. It will take about an hour. If that works, you can try the full bed version which takes about 14 hours. If you want to create a different size of shape pattern, use the "fast_pattern" program. Avoid rendering very large patterns since OpenSCAD will crash. Make a pattern of 150 links or less and join multiples in the slicer (Cura). The precise X and Y spacing to use is echoed to the console in "fast_pattern". This only works with square/rectangle patterns. If you want to mess with the link design, that program is also included. It's quicker to only render a single link and pattern it with "fast_pattern". Better yet, decimate the single link with Blender to create a low-poly version. This can reduce the size of the STL file by 20x to 50x and greatly speed things up. This is fairly easy and there are YouTube videos on using decimate in Blender. March 2, 2019 Fixed some bugs in "fast_pattern.scad"