Basic Tolerance Test

A very simple tolerance test for people wanting to dial in their settings for print-in-place prints, etc.

I found a few interesting test pieces, but they would take around four hours to print on my printer. This one is only 18 minutes on my original Ender 3.

It's not fancy, and has no spinning pieces or levers. It will simple try to print a fairly short piece that has cylinders with different clearance values (tapered on the bottom to try to avoid elephant's foot).

If pieces fall apart as you lift it off the print bed, then it worked and those clearances are good. If they fuse, however, that means the value is too tight for your printer and you might need to adjust flow, horizontal expansion, etc.

I'd expect from 0.6 down to 0.4 to print cleanly without fusing. If the smaller values also work then you can print with lesser gaps. If even the 0.6 piece fuses, then you probably need to tune your settings (or the filament is just too mushy maybe?).

If things fuse but you still see some gap, those could be helpful to measure. Also since all the base cut-outs have the same inner diameter you can set a successful cylinder in place to measure the actual clearance achieved (remember that it is clearance on both sides, so if you place a cylinder touching one of the inner walls, divide the measured gap by two).

In the pics of my test run you can see that the .6, .5, and .4 cylinders/discs fell loose as I took the print off of the print bed. The .3 piece is very loose and would drop out with a bit of minor pressure. So that seems to indicate my current slicer settings are working as expected.

Update:

Added a larger size that would be easier to measure. On my printer & settings it looks to take 42 minutes instead of 18.