LESSON 8.1 · 1:56 · CHAPTER 8 · MACHINES, PATHS AND MACHINING
Robots repeat, gantries are accurate
Repeatability is not absolute accuracy, and printing forgives errors that milling cannot.
Predict · at 0:35 in the video
A big robot repeats to plus or minus 0.06 millimetres, but it's about half a millimetre off in absolute terms. With a 20 millimetre bead, and a mould face toleranced to a tenth, does that matter?
Not for printing. Very much for milling. Half a millimetre is 2.5 percent of the bead.
Further reading
This course is our own. These books go deeper.
- The economics of Big Area Additive Manufacturing, Post et al., Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium, 2016
- Additively manufactured carbon fibre-reinforced composites: state of the art and perspective, van de Werken et al., Composites Part A, 2020
About the numbers
Simulations in this lesson are our own. Where a number rests on an assumption or a single source, the video marks it with an asterisk and says where it comes from.
Up next · 8.2 · 1:57Tilt the layer, not the part