Comment on Sensible wall thickness and infill for tall walls?
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Suggestions here to have no infill on tall structural components that will have large flat surfaces such as large boxes and bins is hilariously bad advice. Unless you plan to use an absurd number of perimeters, you absolutely need to have some infill to connect the inner and outer walls, otherwise they will be prone to warp and collapse in on each other. If your item will be as tall as you suggest, this is likely to happen before the print even finishes. Given the shape of the bottom of most Gridfinity objects, printing it entirely with no infill is impossible anyway.
You certainly don’t need much infill, probably only 5 or 10%. But it’s going to have to be there.
Don’t overthink it. I print these relatively giant Gridfinity drawer shells standing upright, and I use 10% gyroid infill, 2 wall perimeters, and 3 top and bottom layers. It works just fine and they’re perfectly rigid enough to stack at least four units tall (the most I’ve bothered to hook together to far) while loaded to the gills with probably more weight than is wise worth of knives and nuts/bolts.
I tried to print one without infill precisely once, and it collapsed and failed after about 30mm worth of height had been built up. This was with PLA which is the most rigid of the commonly available printable materials; the issue would be even worse with other plastics.
cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml 17 hours ago
Yeah, this is what happened in the original, failed print.
I ended up making the model with 3mm thick walls, using two perimeters and 10% adaptive cubic infill (I sliced with gyroid as well, but it looked weird). Turned out great. I made some that were not quite as tall as well, with 2mm thick walls and 3 perimeters, which worked fine as well. It might have worked for the main boss here as well, but I’m not quite sure. The difference between the models was about 55 mm in height. The difference in material usage between the two options was negligible (< 10 g), with the infill variant coming out slightly lower in consumption.