Eliminate seams in your 3D prints with scarf joint seams - An exciting development!

there's a huge Improvement to 3D printer surface quality in the works called scarf seams today I'll show you how it works and take you inside the amazing testing and development by the [Music] [Music] community 3D printing improvements are coming at a rapid Pace ESP especially those related to the slicing software scarfed seams will likely be implemented fully into Orca slicer and then most likely to Bamboo studio and Pria slicer but these powerful new features don't just spawn into existence so in this video I'm going to take the chance to shine the spotlight on the developers and Community responsible to give them some credit before we look at what a seam scarf joint is I first want to acknowledge Those Behind the idea and almost everything you'll see in this video is located in a pull request on the Ora slicer GitHub the poll request has come from developer noisy Fox and the contributions are not uncommon we can say their name popping up regularly in the Ora slicer release section on GitHub as far as I can tell there were two people who independently came up with this idea VD G logged this as a feature request in the issue section of oraser and they included detailed photos showing their results Michael J Lou also proposed a similar idea but on the Pria slicer GitHub again showing detailed pictures of the various settings and the effect on the print parts so what's happened since is that noisy fox has taken these ideas and implemented them into the Orca slicer code posting a version of the source files with the changes needed in place and since then many people have jumped in to help test and provide feedback and if you feel like there's a lot there note that by default most of it is hidden until you click to expand the posts this is a really long thread with many valuable Community contributions so what actually is a scarf seam joint if you're thinking of this type of scarf go the matildas then you've got the wrong idea a scarf as implemented here is actually a joiner technique commonly used in Woodworking and involves having a long diagonal on the two mating surfaces 3D prints as we know unless built in vase mode with A continuous spiral are built from stacked layers one on top of each other which means that each of the perimeters for these layers needs to have a start and end point and where that meets we call the seam creating a simple model of this we can see that to make a circle we need to extrude an arc that comes around and back to the same position and when these layers are stacked on top of each other all of a sudden our seam is quite prominent as a visual defect here's an example of a print that looks beautiful until we rotate it around to find the seam on the back most slices will show us where the seam will be and we do have some control quite often aligning the seam with the corner makes it much less visible and we can see that in the rear corner of this Beni placing the seam anywhere else would be a lot more obvious there's also the option to place the seams at random and we can see on this preview it's going to scatter them all around the surface this sounds like a nice idea but in reality it just looks like a bunch of blemishes which detracts from the appearance where you can and even if you have to paint the seams manually you want to hide them on the internal features of your print which is why on this Beni we can't see any seams around the cabin area so some tricks but that doesn't help the situations where the seam is fully on display and that's where the scarf seam comes in a 3D printed scarf seam like its woodworking counterpart tries to have a long slope for the start and end of the extruded Loop the idea being that when the layers are stacked the seam is much less visually prominent and in the best case scenario pretty much invisible for the perimeters the nozzle is going to start at the same height as the top of the last layer but over that diagonal movement lift up as it goes sideways increasing the filament flow to fill the void beneath it will then travel around the perimeter with a constant Extrusion before once again reducing the flow to fill the void underneath which this time is shrinking I hope that makes sense I tried to film this in action but you just couldn't see what was happening if you want to join in on the testing yourself here's what you need to do at this point I'd like to give a big thank you to the X1 plus team not only did they tell me about this upcoming feature and suggest I make a video but they were instrumental in helping me understand how to navigate GitHub actions the first thing you need to do is to create a free GitHub account with that one you won't be able to post as part of the conversation and most importantly you won't be able to download the development build to get that we need to come up to actions and then scroll down until we see a build that's labeled noisy Fox Dev SL Noam to make this easier you can set a search filter for actor colon noisy Fox we can then click on that scroll down until we get to the section labeled artifacts and click and download the version of your choice and I would recommend doing the portable version so it doesn't interfere with your existing installation you will likely find that there's multiple builds for this no seam branch and typically I would advise to Ed the latest one but it's also worth checking the tail end of the thread to see if any particular build numbers are recommended because previously users mentioned that different versions gave different results and this caught me out too because I did a lot of back-to-back testing to demonstrate all of the different settings on offer but those results were quite inconsistent probably because I had the wrong version that build1 now seems to be missing and for the record I use build 985 for the testing you'll see later in this video These newer versions are probably the best to use but please double check first once you do download you'll get a zip file and inside that another zip file but now these contents can be extracted to a folder of your choice before starting the executable after you open Ora slicer you can check if you've got the right version by coming to Quality and then scrolling down to see if scarf joint seam is present now for some quirks for me at least the bamboo Network plugin would not install on this portable version and that means I couldn't log in to automatically retrieve my non bamboo lab printer profiles a workaround for this is to switch to your standard version of orca slicer put any type of model on the plate and then save the project as a 3mf then change back to the portable development version open this 3mf which will import your printer and filament profiles you can then open the presets and save them so you'll have access in both versions this interface is changing all the time but to enable Scuf joint seam we change the drop down from none to either Contour or contour and hole like when we select FAS mode will be prompted for the slicer to automatically change some other settings and when we click yes that'll happen instantly if you read through the pull request thread you'll see that testing the settings for this is daunting because there's so many things that affect the result and so many permutations we can see that the shape of the geometry will affect the way the scarf seam is implemented and how successful it is there's also the Myriad of different settings you can change in your slicer that will all have an effect so with that in mind my aim was to create some geometry that would make testing more efficient what we have here is a model which will display a variety of different seams in terms of that it's efficient but the downside is it does take an hour and a half to 2 hours to print depending on your machine if we import and slice it in Ora slicer the seam should be highlighted in white by default and if not you can toggle this in the upper right we can see that we'll be able to test external seams on both round and sharp Corners internal seams on Sharp Corners internal seams on rounded surfaces and for both rounded and Square edges external seams for geometry that slopes both ways and by turning on scarf seam to contour and hole the holes being these two cutouts here we can see that the white seam markings are no longer as visible and instead in the preview we have this smeared type of overlap where the scarf seam is in effect so time to do some more testing but where to start there were a lot of useful results in the thread but one user that stood out for me with cyber Funk printing the same model back to back numerous times and then evaluating all of them in a spreadsheet the aim to not only see which settings gave the best quality but also which gave problems I'm pleased to say we actually ended up collaborating here with myself sharing my test model before it was public on printables and cyberfunk used this to supplement their own testing results which I have to say appeared very impressive in return cyberfunk prepared for me a 3mf file with the testing model set up back to back and all of their best settings applied to one of the versions and I'm very pleased to report that cyber Funk has posted on printables a complete guide to their testing process including a write up of how scarf seams work what effect each of the settings have and how to utilize the testing file not only that beyond the 3D files they've exported a version of the development build for each platform meaning anyone can download it without going to GitHub for anyone wanting to join in the testing this is most probably the best place to start let's look at my before and after results using cyber funk's best settings on a range of 3D printers we'll go back to my original testing printer the bamboo lab p1p printing PG how shiny this filament is makes it difficult to see but you may agree the external seam is improved on the lower regions previously the external seam was quite obvious on the dome but with scarf seams it's much less obvious on top but still fairly prominent when looking from underneath the internal seam is also a little bit different but the shiny filament makes it almost impossible to capture bamboo lab A1 Mini matte black PLA and again the standard external seam is quite obvious but this is greatly reduced with the scarf seam on the Dome the standard seam is quite obvious that scarf seams pretty much hide this for the top surfaces however is less effective where there's overhangs R Rig vcore 3 with pink pet the standard seam isn't too obvious on this one but we still have a definite improvement with the scarf seam this color is forgiving but again there's still an improvement when it comes to the seam on the Dome however less so for the underhang you'll also notice this builtup filament on the top of the print and I found I got got this quite a bit in my testing probably due to the nozzle picking up plastic as it slides over very thin extrusions second SK tank with silk PLA and I hate to repeat myself but the results were once again consistent much less obvious external seams thanks to the scarf seam setting cr10 Max with a 6 nozzle and4 mm layer height and this is not normally a printer that gives me stringing issues so I'm guessing I made an error adapting the settings from the provided 3mf given it's the only printer where I don't use a standard2 MM layer height I think the seams are better but this one's pretty much inconclusive and finally the bamboo lab X1 Carbon printing with Asa filament for me these results were probably the most encouraging with a significant difference between the standard and the scarf seam the standard seam on the Dome really stands out yet scarf seam almost eliminates it from the top angle and gratefully reduces its impact from underneath I'm sure you'll agree scarf seams are a very exciting development and I wish I could have a more concrete conclusion here but the truth is testing and development is still underway and still fluid there's more hard work ahead as the best implementation and settings are still to be determined so it seems like a good time to once again thank the developers and community members who are making this a reality let me know what you think about scarf seams in the comment section and whether you're as excited as I am thank you so much for watching and until next time happy seamless 3D printing good day it's Michael again if you like the video then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click subscribe and make sure you click on the Bell to receive every notification if you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content become a patron visit my patreon page see you next time

Channel: Teaching Tech

Views: 448,002

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printer, 3d print, 3d printed, seam, scarf seam, scarf joint, orcaslicer, orca slicer, prusaslicer, testing, settings, calibration, x1plus, bambu lab, new, pull request

Id: vl0FT339jfc

Length: 11min 49sec (709 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024