3D Printing 101: "The support fallacy"

After yesterdays post, many of you messaged me with questions. So I'll try to clear some of those up here.

The reason why many who are deep into 3D printing do seemingly go great lengths to avoid supports is not what you think. The prevalent opinion is that the benefit is cost/time savings and less cleanup.

Those are all nice bonuses, but the root of it. The real reason is that supports are always potential print failure as long as the slicer creates them. The one exception to this rule are custom modeled supports.

Supports are, by design, less dense (~30%) than printed objects. Of course, that is to save material and to make them easier to remove. Supports are also small islands where the nozzle has to stop extruding, move and start again. The more supports, the more often it must do that.

Printing small islands with little density is the hardest thing for an FDM 3D Printer to do, and the possibility of something going wrong does a 10x for each support structure in your print.

TL DR: By avoiding supports, you are avoiding print failures.