While FDM printers have gotten bigger lately, there will almost always be a part that’s bigger than your bed. The answer? Divide your design into parts and assemble them after printing. However, the exact method to do this is a personal choice. A mechanical engineering student wrote:
After researching the state of the art and your insights here on reddit, I realized that there are almost no universal approaches to splitting a large part and joining the pieces that maintain mechanical strength, accurately position each segment, and also counteract due tolerances. . to the FDM process.
Therefore, I tried to develop a universal method for segmenting large cut pieces, additively manufacturing each segment, and finally joining those segments together to form the desired overall piece.
The result is a research paper that you can download for free. The method focuses on thin parts intended for automotive trim, but could probably be applied to other cases.
You can read about the thought process, but the end result was a joggle: a joint made from a rabbit and a tongue. The adhesive holds it together, but the gasket offers advantages by restricting the final product and the transmission of force in the assembly. Judging by the image, the process works fine. It would be interesting to see segmentation software develop the ability to segment a large model using this or a similar technique.
You can of course build a bigger printer, at least to some extent. It seems, however, that this point is quite large.
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