Tenger Technologies has released an update to their Bricklayers slicing script to dramatically increase the strength of 3D printed parts.
Tenger Technologies is a small 3D print software developer that has previously released the “Fuzzyficator”, which enabled fuzzy skin on top surfaces as well as the standard side wall effects.
They also released something they call “Bricklayers”, which is a post-processing script to be used after standard software slices a 3D model for 3D printing. The script’s purpose was to alternate the heights of adjacent extrusions. This would fill in the gaps that otherwise occur when extruding in the usual manner. That increases the density of the 3D printed wall, making the parts stronger.
While there is some controversy over the legality of this approach — since it’s been patented — it has still been released by Tenger Technologies on GitHub.
Now the company has released a major upgrade that offers a very unusual approach to strengthening parts: non-planar interlocking walls.
The idea is to perform nonplanar movements of the toolhead to extrude material in a sine wave pattern. Then, adjacent extrusions would use the opposite sine wave to create a far stronger wall. You can see in the image at the top how this works.
Without this feature, 3D printed parts can be quite weak because they can break along the weak layer lines. Here there really aren’t any of these weak points because of the wavy extrusions.
The script allows the operator to control this waviness on three regions of a print: the perimeter, the walls, and the infill. Typically, you would not use this on the external perimeter so that the external appearance of the part is indistinguishable from a normal print.
In the video, Roman Tenger explains how to use Bricklayers. It’s set up as a Python script that would examine and tweak the normal G-Code produced by slicing software. Then it can be printed to achieve all these benefits.
Fortunately, some slicing software tools allow for direct and automatic invocation of post-processing scripts like this. It’s just a matter of installing the Python script on your PC and directing the slicer to it.
There are a number of parameters that control the behaviour of Bricklayers, including the selection of which regions to apply the changes. You can also specify the sine wave characteristics, as well as the maximum non-planar height to be used.
The video suggests Bricklayers can be used with PrusaSlicer, OrcaSlicer, and BambuStudio — all of which are related and ultimately derived from Slic3r open-source software. However, the GitHub page says:
“This is a script to add Brick layers to Prusaslicer and Orcaslicer. (As of now, it doesn’t work with Bambu printers)”
Nevertheless, it does seem to be quite a powerful tool that is easily installed and used.
Tenger Technologies has not been able to perform formal strength tests on parts made using this approach, but they are no doubt much stronger. I’m hoping someone with appropriate test gear can provide a proper analysis.
Improvements like this should really be in every 3D print slicing tool.
Via GitHub
