Having trouble printing accurate dimensions
Hey all,
Maybe this forum can help. I am trying to print a small gear that needs to be dimensionally accurate. I have tried entering dimensions from the original part, but when I print it, it comes out much smaller! I've tried scaling it up, as well as redoing the part with correct dimensions in Tinkercad, creating a new .stl and printing but am getting the same results. That is, the part is print a full mm or 2 smaller! I'm using a .025 nozzle and a .07 layer height and PETG.
What am I not seeing here?
Any help would be much appreciated!
Neal from California
RE:
Not familiar with tinkercad so cannot help with the problem, but a work around would be to resize the gear to the correct size in the slicer.
Also by looking at the size in the slicer you can tell whether the problem is in tinkercad/creating the stl, or later in the process
RE: Having trouble printing accurate dimensions
Send me the general dimensions of the gear, is it involute, I need to know the major diameter
the pitch circular dia, root dia etc etc, number of teeth, internal external? I will send back a STL. file,
An Iges DXF STL file of where you are now would be helpful.
I 3D print many new gears and I also use my milling machines to cut gears on a regular basis.
I just cut a new gear aluminium, for an 80 year old wine press, that stripped and it works OK, the rewards are a few bottles of wine HIC HIC
The use of steel in gear trains fermenting wine is a NO NO.
see photo.
John
Take care.
RE: Having trouble printing accurate dimensions
John,
It's a very small gear-the original gear 4.41mm high x 4.75 wide, 10 teeth, 1.6mm opening with a wall thickness of .75mm. The original .stl file was dimensioned at x=48.65mm, y=48mm and z=44mm for some reason. This is for an n gauge trolley bril gear which is pretty small. Any help you can give would be much appreciated!
Neal
RE: Having trouble printing accurate dimensions
Two quick thoughts:
1) in PrusaSlicer, you can measure the parts. How that compares to actual print?
2) Are the units in the STL file correct? More precisely, I think it doesn't carry any, but there might happen a confusion between metric and imperial units on the way. PrusaSlicer has an option to import STL with Imperial units (metric is implyed as default)