I’m making up a pattern to cast some traction engine smoke box doors, scaled to .291, in iron. These have cast in letters on them and in the reduced size some of them are only 1/8" high. This could be a real challenge in Cura 4 and would need a smaller nozzle, like a .1 or .2 to have any chance of success. So I tried Cura 5 which is suppose to be good at small detail. Using a standard .4mm nozzle I did a trial print and it came out surprising well, all the letters where quite well defined, not a single blob in the lot.
Now can the guys at the foundry reproduce that level of detail???
1/8 " is almost 8 layers high I don’t see why the .4mm nozzle would have a hard time with that. in iron? depends on the alloy and method really, they can do really fine detail if needed but theres some design issues. we never did iron or steel casting but we did a lot of aluminum casting over the years and it’s the same thing. one thing they may tell you is have a rad at the base of the letters or the part can crack there, it makes a lot of stress to have raised letters, I think that’s why you mostly see debossing instead or no edges at all on raised letters. we had a lot of raised bosses on our parts for bearings so there were big swoops leading to all the holes and there was extra material on the casting to machine it back in a second process.
I should have clarified it better. The letters are 1/8" across and only 0.025 high. Originally they were to be .06" high and I put fillets and radii on all the letter BUT Cura failed slice them correctly, maybe to small of detail. The height was lowered to account for the lack of draft and fillets (they should be 0.036" high to be scale). The guy casting them thinks that this will allow extraction of the pattern from the sand. I have seen some You Tube vids showing the difficulty of printing small letters of this size properly, Cura 5 seems to have fixed this. These doors on full sized engines were frequently cast with poor lettering detail so if it is all screwed up it would just fit in with the originals.
well, that’s good news. I haven;t tried Cura 5 yet I’m leary of the updates because sometimes they cause extra work and I just don’t have time ATM. the things just gotta work