Scaffold

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Guidelines

The following are guidelines based on our experience with Scaffold. However depending on your slicer, the model you are printing, and your machine you should take the following as advice and feel free to tweak to suit your particular setup and use case.

Printing with Scaffold

  • Print Temperature | 215°C
  • Bed Temperature | From 20°C to 55C ideally, but will cope with bed temperatures as high as 110°C
  • Print Speed | ~50mm/s
  • Support Infill | ~15%
  • Support Angle | 45° & -45° (create a crosshatch pattern)
  • Dense Solid Layers | 3
  • Dense Solid Infill | 90%
  • Upper & Lower Separation Layers | 0
  • X/Y Separation Distance | 1.0mm to 0.50mm depending on the material and how well calibrated your nozzle offset is
  • Support Angle | 46° and up
  • Support Pillar Resolution | 1mm
  • Raft | Yes
Material Pairings
Material Soluble Breakaway Notes
Edge Yes Yes Optimised Pairing
PLA Yes Yes Very usable, good for large parts
Nylon Yes No Extremely strong adhesion prevents breakaway but resists warp
TPU Flexibles Yes Yes Flexibility provides very satisfying peel-away
PET/Copolyesters Yes Yes Usable, but with reduced adhesion
ABS No No Does not adhere

Removing Scaffold

  • Remove the print from the Bed
  • Break away as much as is possible
  • Leave submerged in water to soak for ~60 minutes
  • Flush out the part and clean off as much as you can
  • Soak for a further 2 hours or overnight
  • Clean off the remaining Scaffold with scourer pads or scrubbing brushes (for easily accessible areas) bottle brushes (for small openings)
  • Dry the part - take note that there may be some water incursion into the model from soaking that can leak out over time

Use Notes

Printing optimally with soluble and breakaway support requires specific strategies to get the best results. Perhaps the most important of these is having solid interface layers of support material, where the final top layers of support are printed solid, not sparse. These interface layers are now available in many of the popular slicing packages out there, Slic3r, MatterControl, and Simplify3D. Simplify3D has the additional advantage of being able to manually place and remove supports which can be extremely useful. The latest Cura release for the Ultimaker 3 has very good support material generation strategies too (N.B We’ve tested Scaffold with Edge on an Ultimaker 3, which works fantastically).
The correct strategy for soluble support is quite different to same-material breakaway support. The best way of thinking about this is that you are basically creating a “mould” into which you are printing the build material. The surface finish and shape of that “mould” is what will define the shape and surface of the supported build material. The better you can get that supporting structure to form the shape you want of the underside of the model, the better results you get.
Different materials behave quite differently with Scaffold, and selecting an appropriate build material to go alongside is essential. We obviously recommend spoolWorks Edge as a go-to material for 3D printing with Scaffold as it’s been carefully matched to adhere in the goldilocks zone of effective sticking, while still breaking away easily and cleanly. PLA, other PETs, and co-polyesters - like Colorfabb XT - work decently as well but are not quite as perfectly tuned as Edge, with adhesion being lower, but are still effective enough for use in most cases.
Nylon of almost all varieties sticks like hell to Scaffold. Really really sticks. You aren’t going to be breaking it away easily and cleanly like you would with Edge. This does have its upsides though - it really holds the warp-prone nylon in place, and makes rafts a very effective bed surface for printing nylon. Even though you can’t break it away you can of course still remove it with water.
We’ve made some headway in making Scaffold more resistant to moisture but it’s a water soluble support material, so you can’t have your cake and eat it too! To mitigate this we provide Scaffold in a nice resealable bag with desiccant as you would expect. To make things even easier, we’ve designed an in-bag spool holder that can be printed and only needs some minimal hardware that you probably already have on hand.