As part of exploring the Form 1 3D Printer, I wanted to better understand what kind of modeling techniques and tolerances would be effective for something that relies on being able to interlock... such as with a Lego brick.

So I modeled up handful of bricks based on the unbelievably good and detailed info on the web about Lego brick sizes.  Armed with that knowledge, and the understanding that tolerances for something like this should be in the 100-200 µm range (I even went a bit farther, generally doing 250 µm throughout), I sent my bricks to the printer.

The result was a good news / bad news thing...

The good news was that the bricks did indeed look a lot like Lego bricks.

But the bad news comes down to the functional part... they simply didn't interlock with each other, or with actual Lego bricks.  Generally, the problem was that things were too "fat"... which means while the parts were generally the right overall dimension, walls were slightly thicker than they should have been, which ultimately means things didn't have enough room to squeeze together.  This could be attributed to using the highest resolution layer thickness... which is somewhat counterintuitive.

I'll come back to this at some point, but right now I'm not super optimistic about making functional things with the Form 1.  And, even if I did tune the design to work well on the Form 1, I wouldn't have much confidence in moving that to another 3D printing technology which will have its own unique quirks (or lack thereof).