Slic3r Support Material Frustration

It’s been a few years since I’ve played with Slic3r, so I was eager to play with the current stable version, v1.0.1. One problem I had when playing with earlier versions of Slic3r was that the support material generation was not yet usable. A part I was designing had a big circular overhang in the middle, so it was the perfect opportunity to try out support meterial in v1.0.1 stable. Unfortunately, while the support material worked great for printing, it was almost impossible to remove! The gcode depicted below was generated using the rectlinear pattern:

slic3r101stable

The support material in the above picture is the large circular plug. Notice how it doesn’t leave a gap between the plug and the hole, so it’s completely stuck to the part! It took me almost an hour to carefully dig the support material out with and x-acto knife. Unfortunately, there’s no parameter in v1.0.1 to let you tune the spacing between the support material and vertical walls. Next, after reading that the Slic3r team had rewritten the support material code, I downloaded the latest experimental version, 1.1.4, and tried it. Much better:

slic3r114

Note the sizeable gap between the support plug and the perimeter of the hole. This time, the supports only took a few minutes to remove. The moral of the story? Use a newer version of Slic3r instead of v1.0.1 stable if you want to generate easy to remove support material. An added bonus of v1.1.4 is a new support pattern, called pillars. It looks like this:

pillars