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Below you will find a few guidelines with respect to the technical aspects of participating in the metacycle community. If you have any questions that are not answered below, feel free to contact us.
3D modeling for Rapid Prototyping
Send your parts in STL file format. Before you export your part, please switch your units to inches in whichever CAD software you are using.
Good wall thicknesses for the FDM parts are between 0.06” – 0.10” (1.5 – 2 mm). One reason for use of inches as a unit is because the machine best makes features that are integer multiples of the strand thickness. For our FDM, the strands are .015” in XY and 0.10” in the Z-direction.
Fillets are not necessary for a nice FDM part, but they do improve the overall quality because sharp edges often lose strands that peel off. Just as in molded parts, fillets will reduce stress concentrations and increase the overall strength of your part.
Parts up to 16 x 14 x 16 inches (406 x 355 x 406 mm) can be built. The extruded plastic has strongest strength in the tensile mode – meaning along an X-Y plane. Since the layers are only held together by “hot flow” across the strands (one strand is cooling while the other is laid upon it) the weakest strength is in the Z-direction.
Image preparation in Photoshop
Your images should be prepared in a 4:3 aspect ratio with a landscape orientation. Regardless of the program in which they are created, we suggest that you save your images as 6" by 8" with a resolution of 72 dpi in Photoshop.
Use the "save for web" command in photoshop. Select JPEG as the compression format and check the "optimaized" box. Setting the quality to 60 will give you the lowest file size without compromising the clarity of your image. With these settings, a 6" x 8" 72 dpi image, will be only 25K (Note: file size is previewed in the lower left corner).
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