3D Printing Tools
Slicer settings, filament and fit — with the arithmetic behind the advice rather than the advice on its own.
Whether to add infill or another wall, worked from second moment of area — a perimeter is worth about twice as much per gram.
3D Print Tolerance & Clearance CalculatorHow much clearance a printed fit really needs — where the 0.2 mm rule comes from, and the size at which it stops working.
Nozzle Size & Line Width CalculatorWhat a bigger nozzle actually buys — and why on a stock hotend at speed, 0.4, 0.6 and 0.8 all print at exactly the same rate.
Overhang Angle & Support CalculatorYour real overhang threshold from line width and layer height — the 45 degree rule is a ratio rule wearing an angle for a label.
Filament Usage & Cost CalculatorWhat is left on a spool once you subtract the spool, and why a kilogram of ABS is 19 per cent more material than a kilogram of PLA.
3D Print Time EstimatorWhich of the three terms actually decides your print time — and why a 2 mm move only reaches a quarter of the speed you set.
Threaded Insert & Screw Boss CalculatorBoss and hole sizing for heat-set inserts — why the 2x rule is right, and the one refinement printed plastic adds to it.
Filament Drying Time CalculatorScale a published drying time to your dryer and your filament — temperature enters exponentially where time enters linearly.
E-Steps & Extrusion Calibration CalculatorCorrect your extruder steps in one pass — and see whether a 100 mm test can actually resolve the error you are chasing.
Retraction & Temperature Tuning CalculatorWhether your test tower can resolve what you are tuning — 5 degrees is readable, 1 is noise, and 0.5 mm steps are wrong for direct drive.
First Layer & Bed Levelling CalculatorWhy the first-layer tolerance is one-sided, and why paper-drag levelling is 2.5x coarser than the window it is trying to hit.
3D Print Pricing CalculatorFilament is a fifth of what a print costs and labour is two thirds — so both weight pricing and hourly pricing get it wrong.
Resin Print Exposure CalculatorCure depth is logarithmic, so exposure barely changes depth but moves every dimension sideways at the same rate — which is why holes shrink.
Print Failure DiagnoserRanks what to check next by how much it would actually tell you — and the best first question turns out not to be a symptom at all.
About these 3d printing tools
Almost every argument about slicer settings is really an argument about where material is, rather than how much of it there is. Bending stiffness follows the second moment of area, which weights every bit of plastic by the SQUARE of its distance from the centre line — so a wall on the outside of a part works about twice as hard, gram for gram, as the same plastic sitting in the infill. That single fact reorders most of the advice people give each other. The reflex when a part snaps is to raise the infill percentage, and the arithmetic says to add a perimeter instead: four walls with no infill at all beats two walls with twenty per cent on both stiffness and weight, and it prints faster into the bargain. There is a point where another wall stops paying, because each one sits nearer the neutral axis than the last, but on an ordinary part that crossover is the tenth perimeter and slicer defaults are two to four. Underneath all of it sits a fact no setting can fix: a printed part is weakest between its layers, so the direction it was printed in outweighs every parameter in the slicer. A part loaded across the layer lines fails at a fraction of the load the identical geometry carries along them, which is why the first question about a broken print is which way up it was on the bed and the second is how many walls it had. The tools here try to show the working rather than the conclusion — partly because the conclusions change with the part, and partly because a number you can rebuild is worth more than one you have to trust.