Protrusion test

thingiverse

I could not find a ready-made test model, so I designed one. It is also one of my first designs with Fusion 360, so a good excuse for practicing, and please forgive me if it is a bit crude. Also, forgive me if something like this already exist and I just reinvented the wheel. I was inspired by a model space ship I printed last week, which had vertical planes full of tiny details coming out of them... It got me thinking what was the maximum protrusion I could manage for that type of details. The point is that I do not want to test bridging, but rather just a protrusion coming out from on one side and floating free on the other. I also wanted it to have some "mid-air" changes of direction, so I designed square "steps" coming out of a vertical face, each one having two 90° curves for the outer perimeter. The model has three different widths, at 1, 2 and 4 mm, repeated for 10 different depths from 1 to 10 mm. Each step rests close enough to the one above so that issues will be noticeable, but (hopefully) nothing will go out of control and go spaghetti. I include both the STL and the Fusion 360 file, so that you can improve on the model and make it more relevant if there is anything I missed. My results are in the photos, on an Ender 3 Pro with minimal modification to the parts cooling duct (I printed a tapered one here from thingiverse, but no ring, no double side blow...). I got good results only in the 1x1 and 1x2, 2x1 and 1x4 blocks. One "step" beyond that in all directions and the lower edge starts bending but may be fixable/ acceptable. From two "steps" onwards I think it becomes too much to be fixed in "decorative" prints, but may still be an acceptable bargain if good looks are not fundamental, and one does not want to wait and waste a tower worth of support for a detail like this on top of a tall print. All in all I feel like it should have gone better, so I am very curious to see any makes and see if I can improve mine.