2020-06-08 - printing BIG

last year i've bought a new printer (will write a review one day – i promise!). details aside, it's printing area is huge! it can print 40x40x45cm objects. this opened a lot of doors (again – topic for a separate blog entry). while obviously you typically do not need to print things THAT big, i did had 80h lasting print this year already. so i wondered – what is the maximum print time?

it obviously is model-dependent, but just to have an overview on a row of magnitude here, i've create the test app, in OpenSCAD:

cube([400,400,450]);

it took some tens of minutes and GBs of RAM to generate gcode out of it. it took even longer to process it with a python script for estimating print times, based on gcode. here are some numbers:

• OpenSCAD model processing time – 1s
• model STL file size – 2kB
• gcode generation with slic3r – about 5 minutes
• gcode size – 4GB
• print time estimation calculation – about 15 minutes
• print time estimation RAM usage – over 95GB (gods bless cloud computing!)
• estimated print time – 70 days
• filament required – 20kg

checking this out was an amusing experience. when it domes to predicted results – i definitely never want to give a shot in practice. ;)