The pretty photos of this print can be seen on Thingiverse here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:244578
Below I will show some defects, not to complain, but in the hopes that these issues will be improved in the future. The model was processed with Z-Suite 0.0.3 and printed at 0.19mm layer thickness and 30 degrees support threshold using third-party ABS. Printing time was about 52 hours, and it’s quite an accomplishment for any printer to make it through such a long print without any filament feed problems or catastrophic printing failure of some kind.
In such a tall print with high overhangs, the Zortrax’ stable support is important. In two cases a tall support column failed early on, but recovered by bridging in time to support the overhang nonetheless:
While the Zortrax is superb at printing vertical walls smoothly, it is not so good at transitions to curved surfaces and the underside of curved surfaces:
Some upper surfaces are left with lots of stray strands, it’s sometimes hard to tell if these are support or part of the model, but they’re pretty easy to clean up. Based on my experience with the Up I think there is room for improvement in the toolpath generator for improving the smoothness of curved and sloping surfaces, but I am not an expert.
The Zortrax did phenomenally well on many unsupported pointy bits:
but in a lot of places it seemed to add support where none was really needed:
Some of the tiny spikes would have been fine without support but were surrounded by support rings that were impossible to remove without breaking the structures. If I had chosen a lower support angle threshold I think some structures might have had too little support. This is why I think it is important for the Zortrax software to offer a “minimum area” parameter for support, as does the Up software; you set a minimum area, say 5mm^2, below which it will not generate support regardless of the angle.
Near the end of the print something must have shifted (or maybe there was a feed glitch), because a line is visible at that point around the entire print:
This is suspiciously close to some of the “unnecessary” support, but maybe that’s just a coincidence.