Show off your support hacks

Ah supports. Bloody supports. I’m sure everyone has had them fail at one time or another. Let’s see what you did to hack it to success!

I’ll start. Had two tall and skinny supports fail so I built them back up with masking tape (didn’t have anything else handy) don’t know if this will succeed or not but I had to do something…

Update: Failed miserably. :frowning:

Awww, well atleast youve tried.

Cant say ive attempted fixing bad supports yet. Either they work, or dont, or fix themselves XD

The supports failed just before a large bridge with a few hours left on a print that I think was over a full day. I didn’t want to waste that much filament to print again so I made my own bridge with cardstock and painters tape. It took a lot of pausing the print and restarting to tweak things before i got a good enough layer down for things to correct themselves on top of the tape.

It worked out surprisingly well. The print is a bit ugly in that spot but the part is still totally functional.

3 Likes

I did have one success. I reduced the infill percentage of a piece I did but didn’t check the layers first and then realized there were key holes that were going to print on top of nothing. So I used some electrical tape and actually embedded it into the supports. Worked like a charm!

1 Like

I know I saw one hack online where he used popcicle sticks with a glue gun but this was because the model was very tall and thin. more of a support structure rather than typical supports.

Gotta be nothing if not creative. I’m almost thinking I might have to get some lego bricks to have handy in case I need to hastily build a support tower . But I’m also thinking that now that I’ve had a few fail I might start doing more custom supports in Cura that would be a little more sturdy than the autogenerated ones.

Ive heard that the tree supports work better, I have yet to tinker with them yet. Just not enough hours in the day

It kind of depends. I’ve played with tree supports and they do work great but they also sometimes are generated really strangely and you need to do a lot of support blockers so they don’t grow ridiculous trees for things that really don’t need support.