Wall Thickness Guide
See the printability floor and the structural range side by side, each with its source, computed from your own nozzle and layer height.
Your printer settings
Nothing you enter here is sent anywhere.
Any nozzle works here. The buttons fill in our own two nozzle sizes.
Checked against the floor and structural figures below, never averaged into one verdict.
Two different jobs
Do not average the printability figure and the structural figure into one wall thickness. A wall built only to the printability floor can come out of the nozzle clean and still fail under load. A wall built to the structural figure everywhere adds material and print time to features that were never going to be stressed.
- Printability floor, your nozzle
- 0.4 mm
- Stratasys 4x figure, your layer height
- 0.8 mm
Prusa: a wall thinner than one perimeter is not printable. This floor treats one perimeter as one nozzle diameter, which is our simplification, not Prusa's number: their default perimeter is 0.45 mm on a 0.4 mm nozzle, so treat this as slightly optimistic. Prusa Knowledge Base
Stratasys Direct: generally 4x slice thickness, case-by-case floor about 0.203 mm. Stratasys Direct
Perimeter ladder, computed from your nozzle
| Perimeters | Wall (computed) |
|---|---|
| 1 | 0.4 mm |
| 2 | 0.8 mm |
| 3 | 1.2 mm |
| 4 | 1.6 mm |
The ladder below is a planning estimate, not a published table. It treats one perimeter as one nozzle diameter, which is a simplification: your slicer sets the real extrusion width and it is usually a little wider than the nozzle.
Perimeters overlap, so wall thickness is not the perimeter count times the width. Prusa gives the example directly: two perimeters at 0.45 mm look like 0.9 mm, but the recommended thin wall at a 0.2 mm layer height is 0.86 mm.
Source: Modeling with 3D Printing in Mind, Prusa Knowledge Base
Bureau structural range, side by side
| Publisher | Figure | Job |
|---|---|---|
| Protolabs Network | 0.8 mm | printability |
| Xometry | 1.2 to 1.5 mm | structural |
| Fictiv | 1.5 mm good for PLA, 0.6 mm absolute | both |
| Stratasys Direct | generally 4x slice thickness, 0.008 in (about 0.2 mm) case-by-case floor | structural |
Xometry and Fictiv both put a structural wall at 1.2 mm or higher for a load-bearing feature. That figure is theirs, not a rule we invented. At least 1.2 mm for a load-bearing feature.
Our own inputs, labeled as ours
- Standard nozzle: 0.4 mm. Fine nozzle, reviewed in house job: 0.2 mm.
- Our automated check flags a part below 1.2 mm in its thinnest dimension.
- Our automated check flags a part with an average estimated wall below 1.6 mm.
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