Stop Ironing 3D Prints

• If you want smooth top surfaces on your 3D printed parts, a common technique is to turn on ironing in your slicer. This causes the head to drag through the …read more

If you want smooth top surfaces on your 3D printed parts, a common technique is to turn on ironing in your slicer. This causes the head to drag through the top of the part, emitting a small amount of plastic to smooth the surface. [Make Wonderful Things] asserts that you don’t need to do this time-consuming step. Instead, he proposes using statistical analysis to identify the optimal settings to place the top layer correctly the first time, as shown in the video below. The parameters he thinks make a difference are line width, flow ratio, and print speed. Picking reasonable step sizes suggested that there were 19,200 combinations of settings to test. Obviously, that’s too many, so he picked up techniques from famous mathematician [George E. P. Box] and also used Bayesian analysis to reduc