Easy Terrarium Substrate Barrier Mesh

Easy Terrarium Substrate Barrier Mesh

If you need a fast and custom substrate mesh for your terrarium, here is a good print profile for custom applications. 

The print profile and the release technique is more important than the model. If your print plate is clean and if you remove the mesh gently, you should have a perfect substrate mesh without tears and holes.

You can import the shape you want, or simply create one with the primitive shapes, and use this print profile.

Here are the important details:

1. Use the mesh provided or import a custom shape.

2. Make sure the imported model height is 0.56mm. This is important because the print profile is set to 0.28mm and this way it will be printed in 2 layers. It will offer a good balance between strength, flexibility and print time. (If you are confident about releasing the print, you can try 1 layer only. It will be very flexible)

3. Print with the provided profile.

4. After the print is done, wait until your print bed temperature is around 30 degrees celcius.

5. Put your print plate in the fridge for 20 minutes. This will help releasing PETG.

Optional: If you have Isopropyl Alcohol, spray or sprinkle some in the print bed and wait for a minute. IPA helps with the release.

6. Now you can lift up one edge, and gently scrape from the bottom with a plastic scraper while slowly pulling the mesh up.

7. Enjoy your custom terrarium mesh.

Note: I personally think that PETG is more suitable for this kind of print however if you only have access to PLA or TPU, feel free to try it. PLA will be much easier to remove from the bed while being less flexible and more brittle. TPU will be perfectly flexible but it will be much harder to remove from the bed than the others. Make sure you increase the height of TPU model to 4x and remove it after heating the bed to 80 degrees celcius.