I’m trying to get this model printed at 3 inches long with a decent amount of detail. I need help figuring out what metal would be best as many sections are a bit thin. I want to try printing it in steel, as I don’t have every detail, but I don’t know if steel could print some sections of it properly. I would like to know if steel could work or if I should pay a bit more for a more detailed metal, and if so which one.
Hello, thank you for thinking about i.materialise for supporting you with this project. It’s very hard to give you any advice if we don’t have the file and don’t know the purpose of the part. Please keep in mind that i.materialise, in general, is more focused on consumers printing for private or testing/prototyping needs, decorative or jewelry objectives. Usually we don’t print high-precision, functional or utilitarian parts due to technical limits of 3D printing technologies and our post-processing approaches.
Steel is our cheapest material and we can’t guarantee the dimensional accuracy of the parts printed in steel. Minor deviations in size are acceptable and sometimes deformation may occur. This material is not recommended for technical and functional parts requiring high precision and parts with walls under 1 mm thickness. As you want a print of almost 3 inches the part will be too big to use high-detail stainless steel and as i.materialise only offers standard quality for Aluminium, we also need at least 1 mm wall thickness.You can find a lot of useful information in the guide lines of the different metals on our website https://i.materialise.com/en
You can also make an analysis by yourself. If you go to your uploaded models, you can check at any time what we see when we check your models by using the module “analyze”.
You just swipe over the model and then you get the choice between the option “open” or “analyze”. By choosing “analyze” the program will start checking your model and at the end (it may take awhile) you will get the analysis of your model in your in-box.
For more information how to do this, please check https://imaterialise.helpjuice.com/using-imaterialise/wall-thickness-analysis?from_search=31336007
Kind regards,
Lizy Janssen
Customer Support Officer