How And When To Use Skirts, Brims, And Rafts For 3d Printing

anyone that's been 3d printing for any time at all knows the importance of proper bed leveling and in my video earlier this year titled the top five beginner tips that i had for people getting into 3d printing the second point on that list was to take the time to learn how to level your bed after all if your bed is not leveled correctly not a whole lot is going to matter if your part comes off of your build plate or if you have warping or if things just aren't sticking down correctly now aside from making sure that your bed is leveled and using the proper build surface or adhesives for the specific material that you're printing with there are a couple of things built into slicers that can really help to make sure that your print is successful the three primary ones are going to be skirts brims and rafts and last year i did make an entire video dedicated to skirts and i recently touched a little bit on brims in my video on how to print with abs however i felt like for beginners that are just wanting to be able to understand kind of these three different things having them all in one video a little bit more summarized with a couple of examples and how i use them could really be beneficial so in today's video we are going to be covering these three different adhesion functions that are built into most modern slicers i'll take you guys through how i've been using them over the last couple of years and what my settings are in cura with that being said i know every time i make a video that's kind of surrounded around some sort of a slicer i get comments from people saying well hey that's not the slicer i use and the positive thing about these is that they are quite universal and every slicer i believe that i've used will have these functions built in so you can kind of take what you see in here and learn and apply it to your slicer of choice whatever whatever your daily driver might be so with that being said and without further ado let's get right to today's video [Music] 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description so you can find out more and check out things for yourself alright so we are going to be going from skirts to brims and then to wraps i chose that direction or that lineup specifically because that is the order i use them from most often used to least often used so skirts are going to be filament paths that are added and extruded around the part or parts that you are planning to print when you slice a file and you have skirts enabled before the printer actually goes and starts printing the file that you want it is going to trace a certain number of lines around the area where your part is going to then be printed afterwards for this example we're going to use this print and place phone stand model that i found over on things if i import this into cura and i slice the file under preview you will see what i'm sure you expected which is the sliced file ready to be exported and printed now if i go down to the build plate adhesion and select skirts when i slice the file again you will now see this single filament path around the outside of the part on just about every single part that i print no matter what i have skirts enabled it is not uncommon when a printer starts printing a file for it to take a couple of seconds for the filament to start flowing continuously through the hot end and if you don't have skirts enabled it doesn't have any area to actually prime that nozzle and so it'll start printing out your walls or your perimeters of your part and in best case scenario when the parts done and you look at the base you could probably see where there was a little bit of filament that maybe should have been extruded on the edge that just didn't get extruded but it might not be that big of a deal however in more extreme situations i've seen where that little bit of non-extrusion at the beginning can actually be the catalyst that causes your part to end up warping and ultimately failing also when the hot end does heat up it is not uncommon from either pressure built up in the hot in an extruder or just gravity to have a little bit of filament that droops down from the nozzle and sure you can get in the habit of just standing there and pulling it off while the print's about to start but if you have a skirt you don't really have to worry about that because it's just going to take that blob and then lay it down in the skirt which is away from your part instead of that blob actually making it down into your part which again just doesn't look good in best situations and in worse situations if it's a pretty fat blob the nozzle could actually hit it and it could cause a skipped step now the mentioned nozzle priming as well as the blob removal can actually be taken care of by adding a few lines to your starting g code where when the hotend heats up before printing your part it'll just go off to the side and draw one line and then it'll start printing out your part and that method does work pretty well however it does not take care of the third and final reason that i use skirts which is bed adhesion validation although at this point i do feel very confident in my ability to properly level a bed having a skirt really allows me to take a look at a part before it's fully started and make sure that nothing's shifted or nothing needs to be re-leveled and i can easily see on that skirt whether things are looking too close or too far away and while it's making its rounds and drawing these skirts i can quickly adjust the four bed leveling knobs in each direction if needed or i can adjust the z baby stepping if it is an automatically leveled printer since i'm able to see this before the print actually starts it saves me quite a bit of time because if i didn't have those skirts and it started to print apart i would then have to actually kill the print remove whatever it's laid down and then have it restart the print which if the bed's cooled down it can just add up in time so having that little skirt around the beginning eliminates the need for that and again it just helps with kind of optimizing and speeding up my printing workflow kira by default has it set to one skirt line count but i personally use three the reason for this is it allows me to see the first line go down determine whether any adjustments need to be done and confirm that my adjustments are good on the second or third pass before it jumps to the part skirt line count is a setting in cura that is hidden by default so clicking on the gear that pops up next to build plate adhesion brings up the menu that will allow you to enable it i really cannot stress how valuable i feel skirts are in 3d printing and how much i utilize them next up we have brims and no i didn't change into a hat because i realized my hair doesn't look very good i grabbed a hat because this is actually how i was always very easily able to understand the way brims work and so the way i envision it or the way i picture it which might make sense to some of you guys and if it doesn't bear with me but imagine that this is your part the like my head portion or this part of the hat is the actual model you want to print well this would be the brim or in this case bill of my hat but on a brim this portion would be wrapped around the entirety of your part but it is attached to your part it's not separate so while a skirt is going to have a gap between your part and the skirt and its primary goal is to again prime the nozzle remove any residue and be validation for your bed being leveled still a brim is used to actually hold on to your part almost for your deer life and it gives it a bit more surface area to then cling on to your bed so the primary use i've had for using brims over the years is really when i'm printing with higher temp materials or more advanced materials that have a higher tendency to warp typically due to their larger shrinkage ratio i mentioned that in my recent video printing with abs i used a brim and that was just to ensure that i wasn't going to have any warping on the parts with abs it's not necessarily fully needed but i always have the mindset of if i can just have a brim on this part which is typically easy to move at least on abs then it's worth it to me versus possibly losing a three hour part brims are definitely not something that i use all the time and again unlike skirts that are separate from your part these will actually need to be removed upon completion of your print and depending on the material that you're printing with sometimes brims can be fairly easy to move where you can just like with abs kind of bend the brim and it'll peel right off while other materials that printed with such as polypropylene actually required some kind of a deburring tool to remove the polypropylene brim from the actual model itself for the brim example i'm going to use this hamera volcano double fan mount this is a functional part that will be sitting right next to the hot end so you may want to print it in a higher temp material importing this into cura i sliced it without a brim just to show you how the part would look and then with the brim enabled the brim is pictured in this sort of cyan color and you can see that it wraps around the entirety of the part from the bottom view you can see that unlike the skirt like i mentioned which has a gap between itself and our part the brim actually goes all the way up and connects with your part there are also a few settings you can play around with for the brim but the only one i typically adjust is the brims with by default kira has it set up to eight millimeters which is completely fine but for the voron parts that i recently printed i had it set to five millimeters which was plenty although i've only really used them with these higher temp or more warp prone parts i have seen people use them pretty effectively with materials like pla or ptg and the usual application is a part that has a very very small footprint so let's say you have a model that for some reason is kind of like angled right where it's a small footprint it comes out at an angle and it's really top heavy well you could just hope your adhesion is good slice it and you know kind of make a silent prayer that it doesn't fall over on you but having a brim will expand that surface area and give your part a better chance at succeeding and not actually tipping over so you'll have to kind of decide which parts need them again for me personally it's only been for higher temp and advanced or more warp prone parts but i have seen a few instances where there's just some kind of a crazy model that i just don't think can support itself and having a brim can really help to kind of latch it down last but not least we have rafts which i think took its name or its inspiration from something like a life raft and unlike skirts which wrap around the outside of your part but do not touch your part and brims that do wrap around the outside of your part and connect to your part rafts actually are underneath your part and your printed model or your stl your file is going to be printing on top of that raft this one i feel is going to be much easier to start with a visual so i'm going to use this shelf support i found as an example slicing the part with no raft enabled and then enabling wraps you can see the large blue mask underneath the part that the part then sits on there are a pretty large amount of settings in cura you can play around with to give you better control of the output should you decide to want to look through them when to use rafts now to be perfectly honest with you i haven't used rafts in years unless i am testing out a 3d printer and on the micro sd card or on the memory card there is a pre-sliced file that just so happens to have a raft on them and i have seen other people that use wraps the way i use brims where if they're printing with some kind of a high temp or more warp prone material they'll lay down a big raft and then start printing their part on top of that but that is not something that i have used them for wraps are typically printed with some fairly large extrusion paths that kind of form this coarse grid that then your part will be printed on and my biggest issue with this is that unlike printing on something like glass or printing on something like pei that gives your the bottom of your part a nice clean look i feel that when you remove your part from rafts it's typically not the best looking and i understand that in situations where you're possibly using a raft maybe the aesthetics of your part aren't the most important and you're just really going for success which is totally fine but again i haven't needed them as a form of adhesion help at least not in a really long time personally i feel that rafts are something that were a lot more useful like five or six years ago when i first got into 3d printing for a couple of reasons when i first got into printing it was actually not that uncommon for printers to not come with a heated bed and so if you don't have a heated bed your adhesion is not going to be as good and although you can certainly get away with things like pla on a non-heated bed a lot more people use these rafts to make sure that they had a solid foundation that their parts weren't going to be warping and also the beds and just printers in general were a lot more finicky so uh leveling the bed and maintaining the level was typically more of a chore and so the raft because it is much more of a coarse print gave you a little bit more leniency in case your leveling was a little bit off or if your bed was a little bit off now there is another way that i've seen them used recently which to me is kind of more of a patch or a band-aid but let's say you have a build surface and your build surface got really jacked up right like you have some kind of an adhesion sheet whether it's build tack or some other adhesion sheet and your part almost bonded with it and it tore off a little chunk so you have a divot and that's causing issues well i could see a raft as being something you would want to lay down to kind of cover those imperfections in your bed and at least give you consistency amongst the raft but again that's more of a band-aid and that's not something i use if if i have an issue with a bed adhesive i usually swap it out for a glass or powder coated pei or something of that nature but again it's at least a use case that might be handy for some people if you just jacked up your bed surface and you don't have a spare one on hand and those are the various standard build plate adhesion kind of assistance types and those have been around for a really long time it's certainly nothing new there's a bit more customization available in slicers for those things but they have been there for a very very long time and they are incredibly useful again i use skirts in every single print and brims have definitely come in handy to save my butt on more than one occasion when i'm printing with a material that is just being really stubborn or again just doesn't want to stick down to the build plate and there are a couple of other adhesion things out there i know there's these things called lily pads that are almost like kind of like a hybrid of what a brim or a raft is that i might be looking into for a future video but i'll cover that kind of on its own because i think it's just maybe a little bit more advanced and this is a really good core foundation on how to use those three main settings so i hope you guys enjoyed this video and have a better understanding of skirts brims and rafts how i use them maybe how you can implement them if you haven't used them if you have any questions at all definitely let me know in the comments down below or if you've got anything you'd like to add as far as you know things i missed out on or how you're using some of these different things that would be super handy and i've learned actually quite a lot from the comments section so thank you for everyone that gives me feedback and also adds to the conversation on that note don't forget to like and subscribe for more great videos we make a video every single week so there's always fresh content coming your way and if you want to support the channel furthermore i will place links down below in the description over to my patreon where there are some really awesome rewards huge thank you to all of my existing patreon supporters i appreciate each and every one of you guys allowing me to come back each and every week and spend more time doing what i love which is making content for you guys to enjoy on that note this has been daniel from modbot and i look forward to seeing you guys in my next video peace guys

Channel: ModBot

Views: 120,391

Keywords: cura, cura brim, cura raft, cura skirts, 3d printing adhesion, printer bed adhesion, creality adhesion, ender 3 supports, 3d printing brim, 3d printing raft, 3d printing skirts, how to, cura tutorial, 3d printing bed adhesion, ender 3 adhesion issues

Id: p4R3F1as-1I

Length: 15min 19sec (919 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 07 2021