3d printing with NO infill! Dont waste your filament!

Hey everybody, I'm Technivorous. Welcome back to all my Technivores. Today we are going to be printing models with no infill and the way to do this properly without having the model just cave in on itself is to add an extra shell. So I will show you our setup right now before we get to printing. All right now before we get to the video if you're new to the channel I wanted to let you know that we try to stay up to date on all things 3D printing from filament printer reviews to in-depth slicer analysis as well as a plethora of how-to videos. So if you haven't already make sure you hit that subscribe button and ring the bell so you can be notified every time we post a new video. That being said let's jump right into it. All right so one of the main things that uses up plastic when printing a 3D model is the infill. You can set the infill percentage pretty much anything you want from zero to having it be solid all the way throughout. Now most of the time you'll hear 15 to 20 percent infill is the perfect amount that's what you're going to need. Instead this time we are going to go ahead and leave the infill empty. We're actually going to set it to zero percent and instead we are going to adjust the thickness of our shell. So for the wall line count we're going to increase it to five. This will ensure that the top surface has something to cling to when we get up there and top and bottom thickness will change to 2.0. Now that gives us 10 top layers 10 bottom layers and the top bottom pattern we want to be lines as well. I don't really like the concentric so we are at the right temperature and everything for printing this. I am going to make sure I have supports turned off as well as tree supports turned off and we will slice this model print it out and see how it comes out. Now as you can see my model has almost no overhangs here. It's one of the reasons I'm able to get away with printing it without support. You can use this technique with support you just need to be aware of the fact that super steep overhangs on the top of the model say if there was a giant flat area on the top of the head sometimes can cave in without infill. So you're going to want to judge this on a per model basis this one should print really well with no infill because it all seems to slope at gentle angles. As soon as we get done slicing I will throw this on the printer and we will show you what happens when it comes off. I'm going to grab a little bit of video of it printing with the hollow center so you can see what I'm talking about and we will be back in a few minutes when it's done printing. And as you can see it is printing a hollow shell there is no infill inside there this is equivalent to doing base mode with five shells I guess you could say. We are not using spiralized mode obviously we would end it up with way too thin of a wall and it wouldn't have been able to put our top surface on. We will let this model continue printing and then we will check back when it's done and see how it came out to ensure that this is a viable option for printing with no infill. All right so here it is our model with zero infill so this guy came out pretty nice. You'll note you can see the layer lines that's because it was done at a 0.2 millimeter layer height but it is completely empty of infill. You can kind of hear the hollowness and when I pick it up it is very very light compared to what you would expect from a model of this size. Now it is also important to note that the filament savings on a model this size when switching between infill to a thicker shell is not very substantial. It ended up being about the same weight when I sliced it with and without infill with the expanded shells and it ended up taking almost exactly the same time. Where this process really shines or printing without infill is really great is when you're printing a larger model because a larger model equals a larger amount of infill so when you're printing a bigger model with this technique you will save not only time you will also save plenty of filament and the models come out just fine. I mean it's a pretty nice little model. This is a pawn for a gnome chest set. I don't think I'm going to do the whole set I just like this guy he's kind of cute and I thought it would be a good model because of the dimensions and shape for doing this. Now as I said if I were to print a model with a flat top this technique would not work as well. There are ways around that you can go in and add a actual manual support to the inside of the model to support the head to prevent it from filling the rest of the infill and we will look at that in another video but for now this technique works really really well for models that have little to no slope and not very steep overhangs. As always this channel is brought to you by these fine Patreon supporters. If you'd like to support the channel on Patreon head over to www.patreon.com slash Technivorous. Alright guys that's going to be the end of this video. As always thank you. I'll put a video up right here that you can check out for more of our stuff and if you're still here and you haven't already why don't you click right here and subscribe to the channel.