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I have a resin printer, and when I print medium to large flat surfaces they tend to warp a little after a few days. I was wondering if it's possible to reduce this by adding lines/circles or other geometry to one side (e.g. when only one side will be visible).

I vaguely remember seeing somewhere that they (used to?) mill a specific pattern into the metal back of MS Surface Pro devices to reduce flexibility. Although I'm unable to find anything about that now.

Does anyone know more about this?

Gelunox
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    You are looking for something called "stiffeners", these are use abundantly in aircraft structures. E.g. in wing and fuselage sections. – 0scar May 03 '22 at 13:25
  • As the answer below suggests, one can add stiffeners to a design to provide what you seek. Rather than remove material as noted in your question, you'd want to add material in a design complimentary to your objective. Are you using 3D modeling software? If yes, what program? Some are easier than others to achieve this result. – fred_dot_u May 03 '22 at 14:43
  • @fred_dot_u I'm on the free version of Fusion 360, would be cool if it had a feature to do this automatically but I fear that even if it does, it won't be in the free version. So... I guess I have to make something up in a sketch and add it manually, right? – Gelunox May 03 '22 at 17:52
  • Asking for a semi-automatic method to create reinforcements pushes the requirements into more of an analysis type of CAD program. It certainly should be easy enough to sketch in a new part. I'm no F360 wizard and I might be able to create an offset plane and sketch in and extrude a few fins here and there. – fred_dot_u May 03 '22 at 17:56

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Yes. You'll find this all over the place in injection molded parts even even formed metal like disposable buffet serving containers (although there it's visible on both sides), and the same idea works for resin (or FDM) printing. I'm not actually well-informed on the detailed theory of how you make good geometry to do this, but in practice pretty much anything works.

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    At it's most basic you just put a rib along where you want it reinforced, the shape of the rib makes a difference as well, usually wider at the base depending what you want to do. – Kilisi May 03 '22 at 13:37