Jun.30, 2013
If you need a screen or mesh to give your project more aesthetic appeal, you should check Alfred's latest project. Alfred has come up with a way of quickly (and easily) making custom meshes and screens using Slic3r and a 3D Printer.
First design the outline of your mesh in any shape you want in a 3D software. Next extrude the shape in the positive Z direction by at least one layer height, and Alfred has made it 1.5mm, which is about 4 layers. The trick is to take advantage of Slic3r's "support material" function. So Alfred loads the .stl file into Slic3r and uses the support material settings to change "Pattern" to honeycomb. The "Pattern spacing" can be set to any diameter you want the holes in the mesh to be. He then sets the "Fill density" to 0. This means that the actual mass of your object will not be printed out, only the honeycomb support material.
So when you export your model to gcode and start printing - Your printer will only print support material and leave you with a nice honeycomb mesh of support material behind.
The only thing you should be noted is that you must use Slic3r 0.9.8 for this, 0.9.9 and above will generate a raft under the support material and the mesh won't come out right.
Follow Alfred's tutorial here if you found Alfred's Slic3r hack for making custom mesh screens useful.
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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Another way with other slicers might be to do a low percentage infill, and turn off caps.