Why / When to use this thing?

3D Printing Best Practices will tell you that the dimensions of your part should be designed considering the Layer Height you’re planning to print in and the Wall Thicknesses that your printer prints. This will:

• Help hold a tighter tolerance of printed parts

• Reduce wasted filament

• Reduce the time to print

This little calculator can help you quickly check what tweaks you can make to your model to align with these principles.

While it could be a minor detail for some, I have seen this make a huge difference in the part tolerances when printing pieces that fit together, printed on multiple machines.

How to use:

• Input: dimension you’re working with

• Divisor: layer height or wall thickness you’re printing

• Multiples: Number of times that layer height / wall thickness goes into your dimension

• Round-Up / Round-Down: a whole number dimension you may want to consider

Where did this even come from?

As I have multiple 3D printers, I use all of them to print individual parts of a build to reduce the R&D time as well as production time.

Introducing the variance of multiple machines, even calibrated ones, creates tolerance issues when trying to dial in dimensions that are fractions of a millimeter.

It started when designing a sliding lid of a box printed on my Bambu P1S’s did not fit perfectly into the base printed on my Bambu X1C’s. As a product designer I hated the idea of having inconsistent experiences when using my products, and I wasn’t about to track printing all top & lid pairs on the same machines. Absolutely would mix them up at some point when running large batches of products.

So - aligning all my layer heights to 0.16mm and wall thicknesses to 0.42mm, I have greatly reduced the variance in tolerance using multiple machines. A bit of work in the model means one less thing I have to worry about at scale.