Ryan The Mast
Member
Yes indeed to- both questions,
I have done a lot of test printing on both Resin and FDM machines trying to get this right for my design,
The readily available "Budget" resin printers generally suck at dimensional accuracy out of the box unfortunately. Most people never realize this because they are usually just using them to print mini figures, costume pieces, and desk ornaments that never need to fit together or deal with accuracy all that much. To further complicate things your slicer, its settings, part orientation, support placement, your machine, how you clean and cure your parts, and your resin can all change how accurate things come out. So you need to calibrate everything carefully to make sure it all works for your set up.
For my resin tests I was working with a Anycubic Mono X, using Sira Tech Fast abs like grey resin, It's a newer machine and a good resin I set it up per manufacture, community, and slicer recommendations. Despite all this I found that many of my parts had up to a .5mm increase on all surfaces which is a lot when things have to fit together snuggly. At first I thought my model was bad for a resin design, I have done a lot of modeling for resin prints and printing with resin but not something with dozens of interlocking parts like this. So I did some subtle redesigns increased tolerances and forged ahead sanding where needed. It worked (photo attached) but was a lot more work than needed and it effected the final look of the model slightly, most evident in how thin I needed to make some wood sections to make up for having up to 1mm less space in some areas. Proportionately my the wood on my FDM print looks way more spot on than the Resin version despite them being nearly the same file.. This bugs me a lot, so I made some specific calibration models printing and started tweaking settings to get things to come out as expected. In Chitubox I settled on the tolerance compensation settings shown in the photo, it's not perfect but parts fit together much better, and with those settings I am reprinting everything yet again to verify fitment. Maybe I just should have sprung for the resins which claim "high accuracy", or "engineering" and I might not have had to deal with any of this, but I still wanted to confirm things could work if you dial in your machine slicer and resin correctly.
Hope this helps.
