A Tip of the Hat to Eiger’s New Brim Feature

You may have seen a new feature in the advanced settings panel of Eiger called “Use Brim,” and wondered what it was. Well, we’re excited to include this new setting to help mitigate warping and corner lift (curling), as well as increase the reliability of printing those tricky parts that are particularly thin or have islands (isolated sections of a model, like the legs of a table).

This picture of the lower section of a model rocket from Eiger shows the rendered model in the Part View and the resulting Brim added to the part visible in Eiger’s Internal View.

What is a Brim?

Like the brim of a hat, enabling this feature in Eiger will create a 5 layer tall extension outward from where your part sits on the build platform in order to essentially create an extra “base” or “foundation” for your part to attach to. Kind of like a fixture for your part, the brim can substantially reduce warping and curling, but is easily removable after the part has finished printing. Since fused deposition modeling (nylon printing) is a thermoplastic extrusion process, the nylon contracts as it cools on the build platform, so parts with little surface area contacting the platform tend to peel, curl, and warp while they cool.

Rocket source: thingiverse user Landru

When to use a Brim

Parts that are particularly thin, wide, have few points of contact to the build platform, or generally warp when printing should use the Brim feature. In the example above, the very thin fins extruding from the fuselage area are very prone to warping to due the long extension outwards, but very thin surface area. Other notable examples of when to use a brim would be models with many isolated points of contact to the bed (islands) like this rocket ship caricature found on thingiverse. There are no configurations needed to use the Brim other than turning it on (Eiger will do the work for you!).

Use Brims for parts with:Thin featuresLong, flat partsFew points of contact to the bed (islands)Parts with large fillets or chamfers coming up from the build platform

Here are a few photos of the Rocket base printed on the Mark One Composite 3D Printer in nylon using Brims.