I printed a test of the Black and Decker 20V Battery Charger mounts and found that, aside from an oversight which required a minor fix, the supports in the cable management channel were really well stuck. I was able to clear them out but it was not easy. I decided to try re-slicing with IdeaMaker which I have found does really well with supports, although I also really dislike it's UI. Below is a comparison of IdeaMaker vs Cura supports. The Cura supports got skinned over and are pretty dumb, but the IdeaMaker supports are much more broken up and won't be skinned over, so I can poke some tools in there to get them out. Certainly I could spend some more time to tune things, and probably get the Cura supports to work, but I just want to get this printed and despite the poor supports the model looked mostly OK when printed (sliced with Cura). I just started the print for the IdeaMaker sliced model and expect it to look fine, but will have easier to remove supports. Interestingly the estimated print time was also about 15 minutes less, despite running at a slower speed. The one difference that probably accounts for that is that I sliced with 3 walls in Cura and 2.5 in IdeaMaker (it alternates an extra line every other layer, so 2-3-2-3, etc). I also was slicing without a support interface in Cura to make them easier to remove, but as you can see in the pic, they are still very monolithic and would very likely be skinned over again making them hard to remove.
The downside of IdeaMaker is the learning curve and it's confusing array of tabbed settings. It is really bad, and I am still confused about which flow rate takes precedence (so I set them all the same). If they went to a Cura style menu for settings it would be just about the perfect slicer - or if Cura could add some intelligence to their supports, it would be about perfect. In any case IdeaMaker works when supports are unavoidable and Cura is not up to the job. I still use Cura first though.
The downside of IdeaMaker is the learning curve and it's confusing array of tabbed settings. It is really bad, and I am still confused about which flow rate takes precedence (so I set them all the same). If they went to a Cura style menu for settings it would be just about the perfect slicer - or if Cura could add some intelligence to their supports, it would be about perfect. In any case IdeaMaker works when supports are unavoidable and Cura is not up to the job. I still use Cura first though.
IdeaMaker (left) Cura (right)
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