Absolute NOOB - intro & first of many questions

[OOMDAS]

Hello everyone.

A quick intro - a transplanted Brit living in Louisiana, I've just taken the plunge into 3D printing and designing. Lots of computer knowledge and general technical skills, but I know just about nothing about printers and design. It's a bit daunting, and the learning curve looks very steep but you have to start somewhere.

The main reason for becoming interested was that I wanted to create to solutions for home, garage and motorcycles (not necessarily in that order!)

Having set up my printer and software, I started the usual test print or two and quickly wanted to try out more useful stuff. Online I found a case for a a 150mm Mitutoyo caliper, so I downloaded the STL file.

Upon opening the file in Simplify3D , it appears on the printer bed to be about an inch or so in length, very obviously wrong. I understand that STL files don't have units built in, so how do you know how to scale up to end up with the right size? I tried scaling up from mms to inches and various related factors. After much research online I found a suggestion to scale up by 2450% but this resulted in a case twice the size on my printer bed, and 245% isn't near enough.

Had the same issue with a tiger which I used as a test print, but since it didn't have to be an exact size, I scaled up until it filled about 1/3 of the bed and called it done.

The caliper case obviously has to be a very specific size. Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction.

Alex

[jaystein]

Post some pics and screenshots. Double click the model and the size and scale will pop-up.

[dkightley]

Regarding scaling, are you aware that the stl file doesn't contain any units information...just that any X,Y or Z distance is in UNITS. And a UNIT can be anything.

Based on what you have said, I'm wondering that you may need to rescale the stl file you have by 1000%.....It may have been designed where 1 UNIT is 1 metre. And S3D's UNIT is 1 cm...or something like that!