DIY3D wrote:Is it possible to print such a fine grid
Basically, no.
The problem is that the size of the printed thread is larger than the features you want to print. Think of trying to draw a grid of 1 mm squares using a 3 mm marker: the marker can't draw anything smaller than 3 mm.
In round numbers, the smallest possible square must have two threads. For a 0.4 mm thread width, the square must be 0.8 mm on a side... but it will look like a circle, because there's no way to fill the corners. So you can't print a 0.5 mm square: each one would come out as a 0.4 mm dot.
Even if the slicer can figure out how to emit a 0.5 mm dot, that will hammer the filament drive with one extrude/retraction cycle per "square", each cycle emitting a single dot without moving. If you have retraction set up perfectly and the filament drive doesn't chew through the filament, you could get a bunch of dots.
If you have a 0.25 mm nozzle
and select a 0.25 mm thread width (rather than the usual 0.3+ mm for that nozzle size), then you
might be able to print a 0.5 mm square-ish blob, but the overall grid won't work for another reason...
The gentle surface curve means the slicer must produce each
cube using slices that aren't parallel to the top surface. The slices intersecting the top of each cube must be
smaller than 0.5 mm in the direction of the curve, but 0.5 mm is already the bare minimum the nozzle can produce.
insta wrote:print it on edge with a 0.1mm layer height
Alas, that won't work, because the nozzle can't draw those little 0.5 mm "square" protrusions on each layer. It might come heartbreakingly close with a 0.25 mm thread width, but ...
In short, fused plastic 3D printers have a fairly large minimum feature size: just under 1 mm. For most human-scale objects, that's not a problem. For the highly detailed miniature objects and mechanical features that we techies would really like to produce, it's a showstopper.
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