Soft Chainmail

We've loved printing chainmail similar to this one in the past, but they tend to be a bit uncomfortable to the touch — a bit pinchy and bitey, with pokey, sharp corners. This version “softens” the geometry for a better haptic experience.

Breakaway joints

It also contains pieces with breakaway joints along two edges, allowing multiple sheets to be connected. We found this technique by accident while prototyping different joiner pieces. No piece with gaps worked due to poor bed adhesion, but this one has gaps that close. You might think that's a fail (as we did), but it's a feature, not a bug. The edges of the gaps snap open quite easily with a tiny bit of prying force and allow multiple sheets to join together, while remaining almost invisible.

Why the strange proportion?

There are two types of bridges in each piece for this design: one pair that raises on either long end, and another single cross-bridge bridging THOSE bridges to prevent tangles. We found that the first bridges would just fail consistently if the shape of the basic module was square — the distance was just too far given the limited bed adhesion. Changing the proportion reduced the bridge length and gave it a fighting chance. The cross-bridge doesn't mind being longer because the unified elements below have effectively more bed adhesion by the time the print gets to it.

Printing tips

We modeled these large, so IMPORTANT: scale down to 50% in the slicer. We don't recommend scaling any smaller than that.

There is a 7 by 9 sheet here, which can be made into smaller swatches for testing by splitting it into objects in the slicer. We've also included a separate model with the edge joiner pieces (one horizontal, one vertical, and one for corners) so they can be used for piecework if creating a large, odd-shaped swatch:

• Place both the large swatch and the joint models in the slicer, scale to 50%, then unmerge them into objects.
• Delete any unwanted pieces from the swatch.
• Position appropriate joiner pieces to create your shape. Use the coordinate data from other pieces to position the joiner pieces precisely, then merge the group.

We found the print stayed adhered to the bed well using a smaller swatch. We'll be testing the full swatch this week and will report on the results in a change log. If you are experimenting before that, here are some tips:

• CLEAN your bed like your mom told you to. Scrub behind its little ears with Dawn soap, rinse, and wipe down with IPA.
• DEHYDRATE your FRESH PLA filament like you really, really mean it.
• 100% infill OR extra perimeters so the print is solid.
• No brims or support unless you hate your life and want to torture yourself.
• We are experimenting with changing the bed temperature for the first layer to test adhesion consistency. We're not entirely convinced we've hit the sweet spot yet, though we haven't had any fails with smaller tests so far.
• We're also experimenting with Print Settings>Quality>Thick Bridges to see how this affects quality.

Change log

Watch this space…