What are tolerances?
In all types of manufacturing, designers must consider tolerances. Tolerances describe an acceptable deviation in the measurements of a design to ensure that it still looks or functions as intended. Few manufacturing processes are 100% accurate. It is often the case that the cost of manufacturing comes down to an acceptable tolerance range, meaning that the more accurate you want your parts to be, the more it is going to cost you.
3D printing production techniques are no different, and in this chapter we will be looking at the tolerances that we can expect when striving to 3D print our Tinkercad designs. In general, 3D printed parts can shrink or expand during the manufacturing stages, which means that our manufactured models may actually be different in size than they are in our Tinkercad designs. For example, let’s look at the model shown in Figure 12.1:
Figure 12.1: A cylinder in Tinkercad with measurements shown
As we...
