Printing small scale

[TerryC]

Hi, I've built my own printer based on the prusa and it works fine. I want to be able to model in N Scale 2mm to 1 foot and am finding that getting this fine detail is difficult. I tried with a .2 nozzle and am having mixed results trying different feed rates and layer settings. I am using PLA any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[iDig3Dprinting]

Hi TerryC,

As you have correctly surmised to get good fine detail you need to use a small nozzle size. The thing that you may want to do is to look at optimising your layer height for the new nozzle size, don't just pick a standard layer height. There is a optimum layer height calculator here. The other thing that you may want to consider is the material, not all PLAs are the same so you may want to invest in some good quality PLA.

Also the positional accuracy of your printer is going to be determined to a large part by the stepper motors and your microstepping, plus the belts etc that are driving the axis. the only way to do this is to find a model that is quick to print but will have the detail level you are after and to keep printing it until you have optimised your printer for it. At some point you will probably reach your optimum print quality and that will be your ceiling.