Sliced Eighteen Ways
The coin from the previous entry has still never been printed, and that's the point of this one. Before committing plastic, we ran the exported model through Bambu Studio eighteen times — all ten stock presets for the X1C and a 0.4 mm nozzle, then eight variants — and read the G-code instead of guessing. One ground rule for everything below: slicer numbers are facts about the toolpath; anything about how the printed coin will look is a prediction, and we label it as one.
Three things the slices showed
No stock preset prints the coin at its designed height. The stock first layer is 0.2 mm, and 3.5 mm isn't a whole number of any stock layer height after that, so the slicer rounds — and the rounding lands on the relief. At 0.20 mm the raised rim, R, and lines get one layer instead of two, halving the relief. Three other presets overshoot the height by 0.06 mm. Only the finest preset keeps the relief as drawn, and even it comes out short overall.
The default wall generator double-prints the thin lines. The lines between scales are 0.45 mm wide, and the Classic wall generator traces both sides of each one — nearly two lines' worth of plastic in one line's width, about a third more dark filament on the face than the model contains. Switching the wall generator to Arachne prints each line as a single pass and the excess drops to roughly two percent.
The coin is a rounding error in its own print. The part itself is about 3 grams and under six minutes of actual extrusion. Everything else is changing colors on a single-AMS machine: at the chosen setting, purging at 20 filament changes eats half the print time, and the finest preset turns the same coin into a two-hour, 25-gram job purely by multiplying color changes.
The setting that won
0.20 mm Standard, two edits
Wall generator: Arachne — single-pass lines, excess dark filament down from +32% to +2%.
First layer: 0.3 mm — seventeen layers then total exactly 3.50 mm, the relief keeps its full 0.40 mm, and both color boundaries land on layer lines.
Everything else stock. Estimated 53.5 minutes and 12.8 g of filament, of which the coin itself is 3.1 g. The finer presets cost up to 2.5× the time and purge for a part that is almost all top surface; the coarser ones lose a color layer.
One more number worth keeping: purge is paid per color change, not per coin. Four coins on one plate slice to 77 minutes and 21 grams total — about 19 minutes and 5 grams each. The coin wants to be printed in batches.
What we're predicting, out loud
On paper, the chosen setting prints full-height relief with lines close to their drawn width. Those single-pass lines, two layers tall, are also the most fragile feature on the coin — if they break or print thin, the fix is widening them to a full two-pass width and re-running the script. The white scales sit three layers over dark ground, and no slicer can say whether the dark shows through. These are predictions; the first real print gets to grade them, and that will be the next entry in this series.
The practical takeaway
A slicer is a free measuring instrument. Eighteen slices cost an afternoon and zero filament, and they caught a halved relief, a double-printed face, and a 2× batch saving before a single gram was spent. For any part where the geometry is marginal — thin lines, color boundaries, heights that don't divide by the layer — slice the whole preset matrix first and make the toolpath prove itself.