Many problems in geometric measure theory are centered around finding conditions and structures on a set to guarantee that its distance set must be large. Two notions of structure that are of importance in this work are Hausdorff dimension and thickness. Recent progress has been made on generalizing the notion of thickness so part of this work also generalizes previous results using this new upgraded version of thickness. We also show why a famous conjecture about distance sets does not hold on the real line and thus, why this conjecture needs to happen in higher dimensions. Furthermore, we give explicit distance set and thickness calculations for a special class of self-similar sets.