bad slicing from model that looks good.

[Tonkabot]

I have a gear that I made by generating an .stl with a jscad script I found on thingyverse. The gear alone prints fine. But I need other features in the hub of the gear so I added them with spaceclaim [designspark does not let you import files]. The model looks good, and even looks good in netfabb. But when I print it, it leaves out vitally important plastic. When I look at the 'layer' or sliced view in mattercontrol, you can see it is just printing what the slicer said to print. So the problem is in the slicer? I tried both the Cura and Matterslice, they did the same thing. I guess I should try other slicers too, but it seems like there is something fundamental wrong in the model for the two slicers I tried to fail the same way.

rotor.stl

the stl of the file

(219.71 KiB) Downloaded 243 times

[Mac The Knife]

Opening it up in Repetier, it says it is not manifold,,,, have you tried uploading to netfabb and see if that fixes it?

[Tonkabot]

I loaded it into netfabb, and I can press repair, but I don't really know how to use netfabb and it didn't come out and tell me it was not manifold or anything obvious.

Shouldn't designspark or spaceclaim be able to create a 'manifold' model???

[Mac The Knife]

I don't know. Nefabb won't tell you whats wrong, it just fixes the file, and when its done, you are able to hit the download button to save it.

[bubbasnow]

I loaded it into netfabb, and I can press repair, but I don't really know how to use netfabb and it didn't come out and tell me it was not manifold or anything obvious.

Shouldn't designspark or spaceclaim be able to create a 'manifold' model???

use the online tool

https://netfabb.azurewebsites.net/

[nitewatchman]

I ran it through netfabb in the stand alone program and the repair completed the inside flange skins across the model and the spoke opening in the hub.

I cleared the triangles from the hub opening and the tried to slice. Slicer reports that there were a couple hundred open vertices. S3D sliced it but also repaired the model again skinning the hub by extending the inside flange skins closing the hub openings.

I took the repaired .stl back to netfabb and started looking at it by taking off panels and looking inside. There was a lot of addition skin formed by the inside flange skin inside the model, normally this is not a problem but the outside skin is not bounded to the flange skins. It appears that the flanges were added to the gear but the flange surface did not trim to the outside of the teeth.

I don't know how to repair this other than manually redefining every outside skin triangle at the intersection of the flange and gear.

[Tonkabot]

Thanks nitewatchman.

I added the flanges and stuff in the hub area to the .stl I imported from the gear creator. At least what your saying makes some sense to me. I can try to make my flanges 'overlap' or something to make it all one big piece in the modeller, or maybe I can run through netfabb and just print that. It is frustrating because it looks okay in the modeller.

Also I guess I should see if I can figure out how to make the gears in designspark directly.

[Tonkabot]

I found another free gear generator that can give the output in many formats. When I do create the gear in a solidworks format it imports nicely and I suspect I can make the gear I want now.