At around 11:35 a.m. this wet and dreary Monday morning I kicked off a really BIG 3D print of a Mandelbulb. The first print > 200mm on the new ELEGOO Neptune 4 plus super 3D printer.
To produce the GCODE for my big 3D models I run ELEGOO’s ORCA slicer on my super-duper Ryzen main machine (which runs Windows 11). My old slicer gave up on these really big models and I was worried that even the newer software might not cope. I recall that my old slicer gave up when GCODE’s got much above 200Mb, but my new system has produced successful GCODEs for these big mathematical prints up to 3.21Gb!!!! I think this should be enough to do much of what I want.
The top image shows the beginnings of the first base layer going down (the bed is 320mm x 320mm). The 275mm diameter Mandelbulb I am printing will take 5 days 1 hour and 29 minutes to print and will use 2.45kg of filament. I have a 3kg spool of ELEGOO filament loaded so hopefully that will see the job through. Several unknowns for me in going for such a huge and heavy print. Will a bed-slinger with over 2kg of filament on the baseplate manage to keep the 0.2mm resolution right through to the end of the print? Providing there are no glitches we should see the answer to that in 5 day’s time.
These are really exciting times for me as for the first time I am able to push the software and hardware to the limits for my setup.
Also in the pipeline is a 275mm (on a side) 4th order Menger Sponge. This will take 12 days 12 hours and 53 minutes to print and will use 4.85kg of filament!! Fortunately ELEGOO supply filament spools up to 5kg in capacity, and that’s why the Sponge is only 275mm across and not 300mm which the bed could accommodate. I think the bigger sponge would have taken around 10kg of filament and I really didn’t fancy trying to splice a 5kg spool of filament to the end of the previous 5kg spool of filament half way through a print. Yes, chicken.
Come back here on Friday to see if the print was a success – or a failure.
