I know Lego has high quality bricks, but would like to know how 3d printed quality compare ? I would also like to see the kinds of tricks you use to enhance your print quality.
For what it's worth, I don't use 3d printed bricks. Just thinking about it, but searching on Google only give me information on how to convert from LDR to STL.
The tolerance of a LEGO brick is 10 micrometers, while most customer-grade 3D printers are orders of magnitude worse than this, according to this site. The best I see there is 25 micrometers, which is still 2.5 times.
I'm in no way a 3D printing specialist and haven't used any tricks to enhance my print quality as I haven't printed any bricks ever, but I've heard of various methods like brushing the prints with a thin solvent to unify the layers (of course this would wreck the precision), or printing the parts a bit larger and then machining them to the proper size (which would involve a lot more planning and work for each piece).
The up side is that bricks with lower tolerances could still work in most cases (see the various clone brands, whose tolerance is definitely not up to par with LEGO, but their products still are compatible in practice), just do not expect the same homogenity, surface sheen and accept variations in the clutch power.
There have been various questions asked here previously regarding 3D printing, with very mixed results. Here is a link if you are interested in the responses to those questions.
https://bricks.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&q=3d%20printing
The experience you are looking for to answer your question is slightly out of the scope of what we generally do here on Bricks StackExchange. I would urge you to check out this more specific 3D Printing StackExchange site as it would seem more fitting and hopefully more helpful then what we may be here.
