I talk a lot about getting the most out of your 3d printer. But, how do you know if your 3d printer is capable of doing the job? Sure, if you are making a Christmas tree ornament, who cares if it’s an extra 0.5mm too thick? What if you are making a functional assembly? Or, what if you are building a prototype for a component that needs to fit inside of a housing? Is your machine capable?

One way to know for sure is to do a quick tolerance analysis. Rather than looking at the machine capabilities only, you can now design with certain tolerances in mind. Based on what you know about your machine variability, you can design components so that, even with the variability from your process, you can still make parts that will fit. Or, you can know if your machine is incapable of making the parts you need, in which case you need to come up with an alternative manufacturing process.