Minimum Hole Size?

Bill Arnold

1974
Staff member
Messages
8,621
Location
Thomasville, GA
I was trying to get a small item printed this morning and ran into an issue. It's a simple corner piece that needs a 3mm bolt through it. I did a layout in SU, exported the STL, imported it into CURA and it looked good. However, when I generated the gcode and printed it, the hole was not there. I used UGS to visualize the gcode and sure enough, no hole. So, I went back to SU, enlarged the hole to 3.5mm, went through the rest of the steps and it now shows it will create the hole. Ideas?
 
Designing things for printing in SU can be a little tricky.

I've created some items where for whatever reason, will look fine in SU, Look fine in the slicer, until you go and slice it and will then have a solid layer over the top of it.

I've just gone back and re-did the part to get things to work correctly.

A couple of extensions I use to help are :
Cleanup 3
Solid Inspector

You can get them from the extension warehouse in SU.

And a trick of last resort I've used a few times is to use Tinkercad online to import the stl file, then re-export. It seems to do a good job of cleaning up some stray issues.
 
Thanks, Brent. That is good information. The printers at the lab have a clean-up step in the software to remove miscellaneous artifacts. But I will now use the SU extensions before uploading my file to the 3d computers. I have 3 files I need to get over there and print.
 
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