so, sooo much.
I currently print some stands for some Lego spaceships. I also have over a TB of models from various Patreons that I support accumulated over the months. I also always find new ones I want to print, but rarely find the time to ACTUALLY print something, anything…
Yeah. The general speed that you set isn’t necessarily the speed that your printer will print at. That might be the max speed you might get in the best situation or location.
For example, depending on the settings, first layer, outer walls, bridges and other parts of the model cann all be printed at a lower speed to preserve quality. Your print head also needs to accelerate and decelerate for every corner so that it doesn’t overshoot and go where it should. So low acceleration/deceleration play also a part. And the model itself has to be considered in this too because long, mostly straight lines can accelerate to that speed and stay on it for longer.
So what you set as “speed” in the slicer is mostly not what you actually get. Some slicers have a speed display with a colour gradient after you sliced it so that you can see which parts are faster or slower.
The only thing you can really do about it is to do test prints and slowly push the speed up as far as you can to get a decent quality at a nice speed. But you can still end up in parts where you would be fairly slow.
Depends. I recently was in that situation and it was easier and more cost-effective to just print them.
I recently bought some Lego Star Wars sets and printed out some Display stands for them but the connection between the stands and the model was expected to be a 2x4 Lego plate. I didn’t have those plates at hand so I looked online and found it from the official Lego site.
The individual “Plate 2x4” would cost 0.14EUR each. Since I needed 3 this would be 0.42EUR. But the mailing costs would be over 9EUR.
So ordering 3 of those Lego pieces would cost me almost 10 bucks. I just printed them out which worked well, they were a bit tight fit but are still holding.
But I wouldn’t necessarily say that this is a replacement for actual Lego pieces. As a quick alternative that you can’t see or that has less interaction with other pieces (doesn’t need to fit correctly on all sides) then I think this can work.