To support, or not to support?

Here's the Thingiverse Sugar Cat picture...

I don’t know about anybody else, but I have a fraught relationship with supports in FDM printing.

Considering my experience goes back to RepRap, I’ve been printing supports for over a decade. That was in the time before easy-release supports.

So, yeah, things are different today. It’s not like I don’t know about the improved capabilities of both printers and slicers. But, hey, I’m human - so uncertainty and doubt roll in at times, whereas someone new to FDM printing may just naively charge ahead, hoping for the best.

What my point?

Well, I was printing a Sugar Cat from Thingiverse, and the print kept failing on my Creality K1C. I had sliced it in OrcaSlicer, with tree supports. I’d also turned down the print speeds and acceleration a bit. Fail. Fail again. My hypothesis was that the tree supports were not rigid enough to not move around a little with the high movement forces of the printer - especially as the print bed gets further away from the nozzle. I figured an interference crash between one of the supports and the nozzle was clogging the nozzle, and leaving me with dead print.

Random thought: what good is the lidar AI feature in Creality Cloud, if it’s not going to be able to detect when filament isn’t getting put down? The printer is aware what every layer should look like, so it seems like the feature is incredibly underbaked at this point.

Anyway, as far as the hypothesis went, I decided to keep turning down the speeds on the printer. Then I tried “strong tree” supports. That feature basically ties adjacent tree bases together, creating larger (and potentially stronger and more stable) perimeters. Unfortunately, that didn’t help, either.

It's a bad photo, but a good print.  The sugar cat was printed to a height of 8".  The link to the model on Thingiverse is in the post

Want to know what solved the support issue? NOTHING. I just turned off supports, and printed the damn thing. In the end, I had a great print with no overhang or surface issues. The bridging is great. In general, the printer is fantastic.

…and that brings me back to the beginning of his post. If the K1C was my first printer, I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about just slicing and printing. As it was, I had 6 failed prints, and even installed Creality Slicer, attempting to resolve my issue. In something as rapidly changing as the FDM space, it’s not a good idea to assume that your experience and accumulated knowledge has any present value. Whatever problem you have, it’s safe to assume that there are professionals and enthusiasts looking to dispatch that problem.