10 attempt to make the mechanical door work better

In my design there are some mechanical gears that should work together very smoothly to make the door operable . I had 3D printing this door fully in Maker bot because the laser cutter was out of action and surprisingly it printed much better than i thought it would it almost was perfect for the purpose. the only thing that wasn't pleasant was the support structure and raft that Maker bot makes to be able to print the object finely, Specially for the gears the support was unavoidable.

this piece is the gear holder it was printed  as is ( right side) and side way. which in side way print was better quality since finer details should be supported whereas the side way print it was supported from the base.

This piece is the sliding door which has a number of teeth to be operable with gears. In this part the teeth are the smallest scale of teeth which is designed in the door system and it was very critical to have those teeth printed accurately.it was printed in the same way as previous part in two orientation, upside down (right) and side way. the up side down print seem to print the teeth in a better quality.

Gears
The gears were printed in two or three orientation, side way and laid down.

the teeth in this print  was very good but the print was not great and had some part not printed fully and the support wasn't completely coming off . However I could sand it off.

for this part that has the liver and another gear attached to it , it is very hard to sand and get the extra remaining support materials out.

this one printed well and with the shape it has it could only be printed or molded.


Laser cuts
Now alll the gears could be laser cut and  from different material and all wold be very good for the purpose and I have laser cut the same pieces to compare the laser cutting with 3D printing in this mechanical system.

 this was laser cut from 1.5mm mat board and the teeth are cut very nicely and they could work together perfectly exepte the door teeth which had the smallest teeth. It is still operable but it does not have as much grip due to burned material.

same cuts on 3mm MDF .

comparison.
both 3D printing and laser cutting were good enough to produce the parts for the system but each had their own weaknesses and some is due to the small scale of the parts too.

Conclusion :
the laser cutter is very accurate but for small scale cuts we should consider the lost material due to burns and it will give us a smaller parts than we have sent to be cut and although the laser cut is very linear but in small scale you would see the the burns on the top are wider rather than the bottom since the laser has more intensity on the top and through to make the cut thoroughly to the other side and because of the linearity laser has limitation of shapes that could be produced.
3D printing is just good in amount of details in this scale but it is difficult to remove the extra particles that the machine adds to the parts. Depending on the orientation of the part printed we would get different results of having unwanted support materials that is hard to remove due to scale and there is NOT a set rule that one orientation is better than the other  but the part would print better if the detailed parts are arranged to be on the horizontal axis and continues rather than in segments.
finally in small scale 3D printing adds to material to make it and laser cutter subtract through burning so makes it smaller which in this case 3D printing would be slightly be more reliable but if we take all this to consideration we can adjust the parts so the result is desirable.