For quite a while here at 4PSA we’ve been playing with 3D printing. Why? Because it’s cool and because there are a lot of applications for 3D printing, even in the cloud. We don’t claim to be 3D printing experts, but we took a power user (read engineering) approach to 3D printing which may be interesting to some of you. So we decided to share some stuff with you in a series of articles dedicated to 3D printing.

In today’s article, we want to answer a pretty interesting question – just what level of precision can you expect from a FDM printer? Fused deposition modeling is the most popular and accessible printing technology. The market is already full of printers and even kits you can use to build your own printer that cost as little as a few hundred bucks. For the test, we used one of the best printers available – Ultimaker 2. And yes, Ultimaker 2 may be worth more than a few hundreds, but it’s still an affordable piece of engineering.