Thickened Large Idler Gear for Dual Mode Spring Motor Rolling Chassis by thed0ct0r

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

The original Dual Mode Spring Motor Rolling Chassis by gzumwalt is a pretty awesome mechanical toy. the only problem i had printing it was the Gear_Idler_Large which has 2 gear parts. the smaller one has a pretty thin wall (0.4mm) which should print fine with a 0.4mm nozzle but would not slice in slic3r.
i could not get it to slice properly on cura 2.4beta, though people have commented that it slices just fine for them.
as i do not have a simplify3d license - i could not test that as well.
my solution was simple - import into fusion360 and convert to brep. i then thickened the outer wall of the small top gear to ~0.55mm which should slice just fine in all slicers.
the original design has enough of a tolerance that this does not effect the mechanical part at all, and after a few weeks of it being thrown around and played with - i can attest that it is strong enough.
if you are using slic3r - i highly recommend that you use prusa research's version (located here: https://github.com/prusa3d/Slic3r/releases ) and that you disable the "detect thin walls" option under print settings -> layers and perimeters, as that will guarantee that the wall is sliced and printed properly.