3d Print Raftless with PP3dP Up! printer

How to print raftless reliably with a pp3dp up printer

Contrary to what you have mostly been told by the user manual, your local sales person, or other experts, it is my experience that the up! & up! plus printers are capable of printing raftless to an acceptable standard once they are tuned correctly, with the correct settings used.

In this post Ill attempt to justify why raftless is worthwhile & asnwer some of the common issues caused during raftless printing that put people off it permanently.

 

Benefits of raftless 3d printing:

 

Raftless saves time & material

Youre not printing an unnecesary piece of plastic.

No Raft means less support material sticking to the largest surface

Less supports sticking out means a cleaner post-print finish, & thats a big plus when printing without the raft

Tuning your UP for raftless

3M painters tape

Kapton (captain) tape

 

Some recommended settings & model design consideration during print

TinkerCad vs 3dTin vs Gogle SketchUp

TinkerCad vs 3dTin vs Google SketchUp from a 3d printing perspective

Though I have used TinkerCad the most among the 3 & perhaps havnt used the other 2 enough to truly know their capabilities, Ill share an opinion as more of a beginner.

Summary:

If you want really easy & are new to modelling, TinkerCad has hit the nail on the head with being the simplest product of them all.
Straight forward & intuitive, you know what you are doing. A newbie will love the convenience & natural approach of the UI. The models genuinely are easy to print with fdm 3d printers.

If you want ease, but acept that TinkerCADs lack of any real toolset except for the 1 hole utility is starting to hold you down, then 3d Tin is definitely a good balance.
The problem with 3d tin is that it creates very poor textures, especially when you use a curved surface on a custom created shape.

Google sketchup is very useful if you want to use dimensions & create a very geometric item.
It allows you to make additions by drawing faces, which is quite useful when you want to create little cahnnels on extrusions in an already created object.
Its not fundamentally designed to create water tight models automatically so expect lots of open faces & unclosed walls, or holes, which you might need to check with netfab.

Im not going to hold that against sketchup though, because every modelling tool is designed with a certain approach, 3d printing just isnt SketchUp's approach. They work at the 'face level' on the mesh, & that is a fundamentally different way of modelling than the other 2 compared here.
It doesnt work too well with FDM 3d printers if there are any unclosed edges, but if you follow good model creation discipline, sketchup is ok.
But I did find sketchup to be quite frustrating at times, & also quite slow for complex designs.