Fine Mesh Screen (Now with Rectangles!)

thingiverse

Remix of Wauter De Bruyne's fine mesh object has been created with the ability to generate rectangles added to the OpenSCAD design file. Like his, this is a printable fine mesh screen optimized for slicing with skeinforge. When trying to print a fine mesh pattern (2-3mm mesh size), he encountered issues. Skeinforge sliced the mesh into tiny squares resulting in an object that took a long time to print and had an unpleasant appearance. His mesh screen solved this by layering perpendicular threads on top of each other, ensuring a tiny gap between them for skeinforge to detect as 'lines' rather than 'squares.' This tiny gap is discarded during the slicing process, resulting in a nice looking mesh pattern. This design worked well printing 1.2 mm mesh screens with 'lines' 2 mm apart and 0.45 mm wide. Printing with a layer height of 0.2 mm and w over h ratio of 1.5. Instructions: Design is fully parametrized, download the OpenSCAD file and adjust the parameters. Example for a square mesh screen, rectangle mesh screen, and round mesh screen inside the scad file. Code is organized in modules making this object usable as a library.