Frank

Thank you for joining us. This is episode 21 of Amateur 3D Podcast, a podcast by amateur printers for amateur printers, where we share our thoughts and experience.

Our panelists this week are me, Franklin Christensen, and my friends, Andy Cottom, Kevin Buckner, and Chris Weber.

How are you guys doing this week?

Kevin

Doing well. How are you?

Frank

I’m good.

Andy

The weather out here is starting to get a little bit sunnier and nicer out. You guys noticed that?

Chris

I just noticed that it is really, really bitter and dry. This week has not been good for me.

Frank

Compared to the late fall, early winter, before the turn of the year in January, it is very warm though.

Andy

All I see is summer time is coming around the bend here, and I’m excited to 3D print some repairs to those canopies so we can go camping.

Frank

Yeah.

Kevin

That’s nice. I worry that I can’t trust it though, because being Utah, February tends to be the coldest month of the year.

Andy

Yeah, it’s freezing out there, that’s for sure. I’m just waiting for that to actually happen. I say that, but it was a couple of years ago. We had enough warmth that whatever moisture and snow was in your backyard was steaming off of the wall. You remember that?

Andy

Yeah. I remember times like that. Yeah. Well, this week’s been pretty cold. I’ve been taking the daughter to school every day this week. We leave at about a little after 8 every morning, and it’s been 15 to 20 degrees somewhere at 8 in the morning, so I mean, Canadians are probably saying, “Oh, that’s not bad, mate.”

Frank

They’re not Australian, dude.

Andy

Close enough.

Kevin

Yeah, they wouldn’t say, “mate,” they’d say, “Eh, oh, that’s not so bad, eh.”

Chris

It’s mixing idioms, it’s kind of fun.

Frank

Well, Andy started it last week by quoting Biff, so.

Andy

I didn’t think anybody picked up on that.

Frank

Unless you’re a fan of the movies and you go, mm-hmm, yeah.

Andy

Make like a tree and get out.

Frank

That was part of his charm, though, right, is he never could get the idioms correct.

Andy

Oh, you know what, I think we did talk about that because we talked about how nice the actor himself actually is and what a good guy is and stuff.

Kevin

Yep.

And he completely improvised that whole make like a tree and get out of here thing.

Andy

Did he really?

Frank

I believe it.

Chris

He’s a really good actor.

Frank

Well, and that became a character feature for the other two movies.

Andy

So yeah, that was good.

It was it was a good actor for that position.

He did exactly what it needed.

Frank

I agree.

Chris

Yep.

It’s one of those things where they had the perfect cast to make an awesome movie.

Andy

Do you guys see any of those movies, you know, do you guys see the fake trailer for Back to the Future 4?

Frank

No.

Andy

Kind of wanderin’ around the Internet.

It brings back some desire.

It’s a shame that it’s fake, but.

Chris

Do post a link.

Andy

Yeah, yeah, I’ll have to pull it up and find it.

It’s a good little intro, but they they just reused a lot of video and stuff from the TV shows or whatnot.

But it does look like a trailer and it looks like the kind of trailer.

It looks like the kind of thing we would do nowadays where everything’s a little bit more serious and dark and stuff like that.

It’s got that feel to it.

So it it definitely feels like something that could be being produced.

But I don’t think Michael J. Fox is in any position to be doing any acting nowadays.

And there’s a lot of age on everybody else too.

So they would they would probably have to get some different actors if they were to remake some of it instead of being him going to the future.

Frank

It could be his offspring coming back in time and he can play himself only older.

Andy

Yeah, there you go.

Chris

Yeah.

Well, does anybody find the find it interesting that, you know, in the bad in the future that he goes to fix, um, he couldn’t play guitar anymore because he screwed up one of his nerves in his hand.

Right.

Kevin

Yeah.

Andy

I don’t remember that.

Chris

Yeah.

Because Michael J. Fox actually has Parkinson’s and cannot play guitar.

Andy

Yeah.

Chris

Weird how that happens.

kevin

Yeah.

It was it was that he couldn’t play anymore because he let needles go to him into a street race and then he slammed into a Rolls Royce and broke his wrist.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Andy

Makes sense.

Kevin

“Well, I can’t let them think I’m chicken, mom.”

Andy

And instead of doing a back to the future four because you don’t want to miss with the the three movies, you know, that I think

Frank

And the formula that’s there.

Andy

Yeah.

Yeah.

But you would like it.

Frank

Look at what happened with Indiana Jones.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

They just they didn’t work with four and I want to see five, but I’m not sure if I will.

Kevin

Right.

Chris

I’m pretty sure Harrison Ford wants Indiana Jones dead.

Kevin

Well, he has said that he has said that once he’s done, that Indiana Jones needs to be done also.

He doesn’t want anybody else playing Indiana Jones.

Frank

Hmm.

Andy

Well, by the time he passes away or whatnot, we’ll have the technology to not need an actor to play him.

Kevin

Right.

Frank

Um, they’re already working on trying to build contracts around that.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

So the production company can use your likeness after you’re dead, if they have cause to.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

I’m sure eventually it’ll just be like, “well, we’ve got all of this content resources for” I don’t know, what’s his name, “Marilyn Monroe, let’s use her for, you know, yeah, make her an actual character in this new movie.”

Chris

Yeah, that’s weird.

It reminds me of some dystopian sci-fi movie I saw where some guy had signed his brain over to the company.

So, uh, like they basically did a backup of his brain every so often and he died in a car wreck.

Frank

Yeah.

Andy

Okay.

Chris

You’re, you don’t realize till the end of the movie that you’re seeing from the point of view of the guy actually inside the box.

And when he discovers that he’s on the inside of the box and it’s not him trying to get his wife into a robot body, it’s, he spends the whole movie trying to get his wife’s brain back up into a robot, into a robot body.

But it turns out that he was in the box the whole time and the company was using what he was doing to try to make new robots and things and anyway, long story short, it ends with the wife finding a way to finally turn his, turn his box off so he can die.

Frank

And right now we need to do a spoiler alert late.

If you know this movie, don’t blame us because Christy said it to ruin it for you.

Frank

I think if he didn’t say the title, he just said the premise.

So.

Frank

Yeah, but you start watching it and you go, oh, this is the one that Chris was talking about.

Chris

If you haven’t seen it by now, then, you know, that’s probably way down your list anyway.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

So probably anybody been working like mirror off of that.

Andy

I wish they’d make more black mirrors.

I like those ones.

Chris

Well, actually, that’d be even a cool, that’d be even a cooler premise for like a new hellraiser.

You know, yeah, your hell is being tortured in a computer program forever.

Frank

Oh, they do an episode of the black mirror for that anyway.

Andy

Have they stopped making black mirror?

Frank

I think that the pandemic threw a wrench in the program.

I don’t know how bad I haven’t done any research on it, but they did like three or four episodes aired when we were about a year in and I haven’t seen or heard any news about it since then.

Andy

Okay, it looks like just Googling here and looking at some information off of the Google acquired says as of December of last year, 2022, black mirror season six doesn’t have an official release date, but it’s likely to see the next season before the end of 2023.

So it sounds like they’re just being really slow, but they haven’t actually been canceled.

Chris

So I think I saw a promotion on Netflix that they were doing something like that.

That’s right.

Andy

That’s good.

They got something there, money-making, or a good idea for a TV show and whatnot.

Chris

Although it’s basically, it’s basically the modern Twilight Zone.

Andy

So yeah, I wonder how many people were turned off from the very first episode that they did of it.

If people are going to see a TV show and based off the first episode, I think their first episode was a bad choice.

Frank

Maybe, I’m trying to remember which one was the first episode.

Andy

The pig.

Frank

Oh, yeah.

That may have been a bad.

Andy

That was the very first episode, I believe.

Don’t hold my feet to the fire on that one, but I’m like 90% sure the first episode was with the pig and that was, that was too much for me.

I couldn’t finish it.

Frank

That was much.

Andy

But I did wind up seeing the second episode and was like, oh, this isn’t so bad after all.

Frank

The social commentary is curious.

Anyway, Andy, you, you tried to get us to move along and I ran right over you with it.

Andy

All right.

Frank

Why don’t you start?

Andy

Okay.

Frank

No, that was me writing under Chris, not over, so.

Andy

So this last week, I’ve only had one simple project.

I was concerned about the pump, the impeller on one of my aquarium pumps, just visually looks to be undersized and I wanted to kind of experiment with it by 3D printing a larger impeller fins to see if I could, you know, occupy more of the cavity that is built for the impeller to see if I can get it to pump a little bit better. The pump I’ve got’s only a hundred, I was at a hundred liters an hour I think it is. And for the size of canister filter, like around four to six hundred is more normal.

So it was reasonable to try to get more out of it. But the little impellers are kind of expensive, so I didn’t want to hurt anything by breaking it to make it work with something else. The impeller itself has just got like a magnet assembly on the back and that’s attached to the propeller.

And so I can’t just like, it’s not like geared or anything like that. But my first attempt last week was just to make like an extension onto the impeller blades that are already there. That way I’m not cutting anything to make brand new impeller blades and things. It meant it would be a little bit less efficient because it wasn’t going to like line up perfectly.

It wasn’t, you know, the blades weren’t these long flat surfaces. It was the original one and then a slightly offset 3D printed one added onto the back. But you know, it’d give me an idea if it was worth going forward, but I wound up making one and 3D printing it out of, uh, PETG and putting it on and it worked just fine. It was a little bit on the noisy side.

I think I made the hole for the center shaft a little bit too large, so it was flopping around a little bit. But I’ll be damned if it didn’t almost double the output of the filter itself just with that.

So I looked up to see if I can purchase another impeller.

That way I can have one to tear apart without breaking the original in any way. And I wound up getting it, but excuse me, haven’t moved forward from there. I want to take apart the old one and I’ve got the new one in it now.

That way I’ll always have one that works.

But now I’ve got the old one I can actually clip off the fins and then make an attachment that I can glue onto the old post that is like a full-size fin assembly that is larger and then I could play around more with, you know, what’s the perfect size, the optimum size for getting as much out of the pump as I can. So I mean, it’s not as good as I was hoping, but I might be able to get two and a half to three times the output that it originally was doing by that change and it’ll be good.

That’s the only thing I did this week. I didn’t play around too much with my printer. I’d like two of, but I just ran out of time.

Frank

So it might be a lifetime of the part situation, but have you noticed any downfall to taking advantage of all that available space like we were worried there might be?

Andy

It doesn’t seem to be.

I mean, the only thing that I could imagine was that it was for like the flow of the water needed that extra space in order for the pump to work right, you know, the fluid dynamics of how it worked.

But so just the straight raw experimenting that I had that replacement impeller sitting up here on the desk and I just don’t see the darn thing or otherwise show you guys, which doesn’t do the listeners any good.

Chris

Unless they hear that crunch under your wheel when you move your chair back

Andy

but anyway, you know, after making the impeller a little bit larger and seeing more output, that kind of makes me think that maybe it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with it. That particular impeller is pretty common used in other pumps. So it kind of makes me feel like it was kind of, you know, they built the pump around an impeller or maybe an assortment of ones that might have worked and the one that’s in mine is just really cheap and it works good enough.

So they used it, but you know, it could have used something different.

I don’t know.

Frank

Maybe as the culmination of buying a bunch of common parts and making them work like that and the, like the body of the pump and the impeller are just enough different in size that they’re doing their best and they don’t want to mass produce or redesign something that fits better.

Andy

Yeah. They could have designed the pump to use a couple of different types of impellers because they were purchasing separate and so that, that might be why it’s, you know, there might have been a bigger impeller that they were using that could fit this particular pump.

And well, I just bought the really cheap version of it.

So they used the cheap parts and so I get one that works well enough, but you know, I wasn’t originally designed for that particular impeller, which that was my first idea. But if I go around and look at even some of the more expensive pumps, that seems to be the case too. There’s a pretty large void with the pretty small impeller. So I don’t, I don’t know what the reason is.

I let it run with it and I mean, and it was causing more force on the pump than it should be because it was just like an addition onto it, you know, it wasn’t designed for it. And it was making a pump more. So I thought, okay, that might produce a little bit more heat on the pump side and things like that.

Yeah. But, but, you know, the motor itself also is just a coil. There’s no moving parts in the motor itself. The impeller is just magnetic driven. So I mean, but, you know, the magnet, the force from the magnet could cause more heating of the, of the pump.

But in these particular units, I mean, it’s, it’s, it uses the water to cool everything down from the tank.

So I mean, I could end up with more heat in the tank than I need, but that’s really not the case for where fish tanks, you know, you tend to heat them up, not needing to cool them down.

Sometimes you need to cool them down, but it’s rare.

So I don’t know.

Chris

Yeah, you do want to keep them heated up.

I had a fish tank in my first department and then we had a power out for like three days.

Chris

Yeah.

Andy

And I couldn’t keep my tanks warm enough.

Chris

My fish died.

Andy

Yeah. It’s, it’s kind of an icky one.

I’ve got a, yeah, if we ever lose power on these ones here and it starts to get too cold. Well, we’ve got the backup inverters.

We connect to our vehicles to run the house when power goes out. So it’s a little bit less of an issue, but yeah, definitely something you want to keep your eye on.

That’s been in the project I’ve been working on.

Frank

Huh.

Chris, you’ve been working on anything this week?

Chris

I’ve been looking for work all week, but I did, I did post that UNO box, you know, I actually did that a couple of weeks ago and forgot to tell you guys about it.

And yeah, it’s, it’s pretty cool.

As you know, the wife has every UNO set ever, ever made

Frank

only because he told me before we started the podcast.

It hadn’t occurred to me.

Andy

Yep.

She’s a, she’s a big UNO fan.

She’s got every version of it. So I printed up, it’s, it’s, it’s on Thingiverse.

It’s this, it’s basically a rugged card box and shoot, I don’t know who the user is that posted the UNO lid, but it’s got the actual UNO logo on the top of the lid.

Kind of neat.

Frank

Cool!

Kevin.

Kevin

Yes.

Frank

What have you worked on this week?

Kevin

I’ve been printing mini figures.

So when, when I first got it and subscribed to Lootbox, which is a subscription service that turns out fantasy, well, they’ve got, they’ve also got sci-fi, but I subscribed to the fantasy side. They give out a lot of STL files on a monthly basis.

And at first my wife said, “well, why are you doing this?”

“Why are you printing these minis?”

“Why are you going on Hero Forge and making your custom minis?”

“You guys don’t use minis in your game.”

And I said, “we don’t now, but if I print some, maybe we’ll start” and she was not convinced.

Well, then on this last gaming session that we had just a couple of weeks ago, her, no, it was last week, a week ago, the game master brought his battle mat and we used minis. And so at that point, my brother-in-law and his stepson went on Hero Forge and made some.

So I need to print those for them still.

But I printed minis for my younger son who is, who has joined a D&D group club in, at his school.

And he, so he went on Hero Forge and made his character that I printed and he also made a character for his friend that he paid for.

And I printed that and today I’ve been cleaning up the prints, getting the supports off and ended up having to get this X-acto knife that came with the accessory set that I talked about a couple of weeks ago and the, the flush cutter dykes are, they’re huge.

They’re like half to three quarter inch blades on them. They’re enormous.

And so I couldn’t really get into the smaller nooks and crannies there, but it came with an exacto knife and the cap on it is a terrible thing. It was on way too tight and as we were having our pre-recording conversation, I was trying to get this cap off and I told myself, I need to do this very carefully or else I’m going to slice myself up with this and sure enough, I did.

So I jabbed my thumb, got blood on the mini figure, had to clean that off. So I think I’m going to try to find a better solution because it was on crooked, but I’ve played around with trying to get it back on and it’s, it’s just way too snug.

So.

Frank

Hmm.

Sounds like a job for PLA or uh TPU.

Sorry.

Sounds like a job for TPU. Andy, surprised you didn’t speak up sooner.

Andy

would be a fun little project to reprint the cap for the knife.

That’s for sure.

Frank

Yeah.

Andy

A safer one than the one it came with.

Kevin

Yeah. Because it is just way too tight on there.

I don’t want to put it back on. Otherwise, I’ll slice myself up taking it off again.

Frank

Yeah, we don’t want that.

Kevin

Right? Good news is it didn’t hurt because this blade is as sharp as you can imagine it could be.

Andy

That feels worse, but it was so sharp.

You didn’t feel it. That seems like something that would have caused more damage than, than a little bit more.

Kevin

Oh! I felt it, but it didn’t hurt.

Chris

Yeah. Well, for future reference there, Kev, there, you can, you can just pop on Thingiverse and the people have all kinds of nice exacto caps you can print right up.

Kevin

Yep.

Andy

Oh, there you go.

Might take the time from sitting down and having to design one.

Chris

Yeah.

I just did a quick search and yeah, they’ve got a nice selection.

Andy

So. If I could go back to one thing that I was saying, because I finally found it, to show all the audio listeners, a picture of the impeller that I was talking about, you got the, the magnet on the back here that’s kind of the, the special part. And then the plastic top that’s the impeller, I should be able to just reprint this whole plastic top piece with the actual blades, but the, the first one I did was just kind of like a cap that I put on extra to the top.

It was driven by the area.

Frank

Okay.

Andy

Yeah, it was just driven by the impeller itself. I just, I just made the blades a little bit longer so that they actually connected with the impeller below it and, and that’s how I drove it before, but it was kind of bumping around a little bit, making a little bit of noise.

So I didn’t leave it in there to use it permanently, but I did let it run for like an hour to see if I had any extra heat from the motor. But you know what would have been a better idea and I’ll do this next time so that I can see how it’s in fact impacting the motor is hooking it up to a kilowatt meter so I can see how much power it’s actually pulling and see if there’s a difference there. Because instead of trying to figure out all this is generating more heat in this, you know, 20 gallons of water system being cooled down, you’re not going to notice heat right off the bat, but you would notice more power usage.

So I’ll play with that next time.

Frank

But And being a three dimensional situation, I don’t imagine the heat would necessarily translate to your heat gun coming from the pump to the front of the tank.

Andy

Yeah, yeah, we’re going to be very little, I think, but I’d probably see up more in its power usage.

So I’ll check that next time and hopefully after we’re done with this podcast, I’m going to sit down and try to print a new impeller for it and see how that goes.

Frank

Sounds like a plan.

Andy

I didn’t mean to come back to that one, but yeah, it was stuck to the bottom of my laptop.

That’s why I couldn’t find the damn thing because it’s a magnet. I found the battery of the laptop. So I kept on lifting up the laptop looking for it and just like, where the hell did it go?

Frank

An experienced techie.

Well, okay, we are talking about you, but I would expect an experienced techie to be more conscious about magnets near their electronics.

Andy

We live in an SDD world nowadays.

So you know, it’s not that much.

Chris

I was going to say, yeah, the hard drives don’t work like that anymore.

Frank

Yeah, but when it becomes a habit to be careful about it, you just naturally do it now.

Andy

Yeah, it’s a stack of broken hard pads that’s different.

Chris

I have a 1.4 meg floppy and it is magnet.

I have it sitting on my bear fridge with a magnet and it’s the master boot disk.

The old Windows 98 master boot disk.

Chris

Oh, that’s beautiful and you guys stuck to the fridge with a magnet.

Frank

That sounds to me like very similar to the note that some mother left her son put a note with a pin going through the condom saying, if you’re going to do this, use a condom.

Chris

No, she just wants grandkids.

Frank

No, I’ll get my own.

Andy

That’s wonderful.

How about you, Frank?

What have you been working on?

Frank

I think that my battle with my 3D printer for the last month is kind of finally nearing a close.

Andy

Oh, hell, yeah.

Frank

It started, it’s getting to the point where it’s running real well.

I did, my wife isn’t here, so she won’t hear this until after Valentine’s Day anyway. I found a dragon. I think I found it initially on Cults, but I looked at some other websites and it looks like the same maker is selling it a couple of different places.

The dragon has got some heart shaped segments and it’s a print in place movable dragon and each of the segments has got a rose on it and it’s got some spikes in the middle that are coming through the rose, but otherwise the roses are just all over the place and I think my wife will really appreciate that.

And then just the last couple of days, I have been designing and installing some inserts for my Dremel tool box. I bought one of the bigger, I don’t even know how many pieces was in it originally. It was like 300 pieces or whatever, a bigger kit for the Dremel tool. And I’ve just added to it over the last 10 years. So what I’ve done is I’ve printed off some inserts to go on each of the compartments to help organize it.

And while I was doing that, printing it off, I have had this experience where the first layer has been kind of weirdly thin, but everything has been doing okay until I tried to print with the TPU and it just wasn’t doing very well.

So I did some research and oh, come find out, my bed leveling technique is apparently leaving the nozzle too close to the bed by having it set to zero, but I added a half a millimeter to the level. So it’s just a half a millimeter lower and got a perfect first layer and the print itself just came out really great afterwards too.

Andy

So can I offer a thought on that because that is great.

With your bed leveling, you’re trying to be absolutely perfect by it.

It sounds like you kind of guessed on what the best would be for how far to raise the head up from the bed, but I know the first layer has its own offset, its own size for the first layer that is often a little different than the rest.

I think mine is .3 millimeters. It might be worth one of these times to see what Cura has set out for years for it to do the first layer and try setting it exactly that and see how it turns out.

It’d be kind of neat if you went and did the first layer perfectly to see how well that would turn out.

Now, I know what I’m printing, I try to get more squish so it’s kind of more pressed into the bed, so you tell it, yeah, I’m going to do a .3 layer, but I’ve actually only got it set to .1, maybe .1, .5 millimeters from the top of the bed surface, you know, that way you get that squish as the plastic comes out, but that’d be interesting to see how it would work if you had it set perfectly.

Frank

So I’ve actually had it set as close to zero as I can for the Z, so I’ll raise the, because my feeler gauges are only fractions of a millimeter, I set my Z at .3 millimeters up, and then I used the .3 feeler historically to get the bed height, and so what I did last night when I changed that bed height was I used the .35 feeler, and that’s the one that went from a super thin first layer to the perfect first layer.

Andy

Oh, okay.

Chris

Frank’s an alien, he has feelers.

Frank

So it was, I mean, as far as the printer is concerned, it’s starting at..

Andy

would that be .05?

Frank

What’s my setting here? .288 is what it has for the first layer of my raft, and it was actually printing at .338 instead of .288, so it’s just a 500th of a millimeter higher than what it thinks it is, and that’s what resulted in that perfect first layer. All the changes after that are the same as what it expects it to be.

Andy

So when you start printing your first layer, it’s not at zero on the Z either, then, huh?

Frank

Well, no, it’s zeroed out, but the first layer from Cura chooses the height for the first layer and prints there. So the only thing I’ve adjusted is there’s a physical extra 5 100ths of a millimeter higher in Z for that first layer. Everything else, like I said, is the same as always.

Andy

Well, that’s interesting. I always thought it started out at zero for the first layer and printed out like that.

I’ll have to look at that next time and see what mine’s doing, because that would be interesting, because I mean, I’m setting my zero at maybe like .2 millimeters under .2 millimeters away from the bed.

It’s where my zero on my Z is. But then when it goes to print, I believe my Z is at zero for that first layer, which couldn’t make any sense, because that would mean the print is going to be about .2 millimeters taller than it should have been when you get to the final print.

I’ll have to look into that. That’s interesting.

Frank

Do you change your Z offset in Cura?

Andy

No. No. My Z sets zero.

I only have to offset the X and Y.

Frank

So where your machine is, what’s the word, indexed for zero is whatever your first line width below where it starts printing, at least as far as all of this is concerned, unless you change your Z offset.

I did change the indexing just a little bit to see what the button does on my machine. That’s what I do, right?

And so I adjusted it up to the .3 and reset that as the zero.

And then because it’s got the proximity sensors for everything, I had it return to zero and the Z was a negative number, because its position was the normal zero. And so I just reset it to that, because that’s the important index anyway.

And then my first layer is based off of that as well. So obviously you can have your build plate off, and that’s where the squish really happens anyway, right? Is you’ve got it a little close to the nozzle.

Andy

Yep, a little bit closer than what it suspected. That way you kind of squish the plastic out as it prints.

Chris

Don’t squish, it might leak!

Frank

Actually, part of the issue I think I was having was, especially with the softer plastic like TPU, it didn’t have room to extrude.

And so the extruder was so pushing on it, and that was not having any effect, because it didn’t have room to come out of the nozzle, or not enough room, obviously.

So it kind of makes me wonder if I have accidentally been deploying squish without realizing.

Andy

It sounds like, yeah, if you were printing right at zero zero, you’d be getting a lot of squish.

Frank

Well, and it wasn’t a conscious thing, and it hasn’t been the things I adjusted while I was fixing this and that and the other.

It became an issue in the last, I don’t know, two weeks that it started having that first layer so thin, some adjustment somewhere.

And so adjusting my approach to how I leveled my bed ended up fixing that one issue and resulted in a much better print than I’ve had for a little while, at least for the first level.

Andy

That’s good. That’s good.

That still makes me want to really check out to see where the Z zero zero is on Cura. Is it the level that it starts printing at, or is it at the bottom of that first layer?

Frank

Or is it just something, the machine?

Andy

Yeah, but I wonder too, if we’re talking about like those kind of measurements being within the error of the machine anyway, those kind of a moot issue, it could be either one and won’t really matter a whole lot by point, like a thousand meters or whatever, but yeah.

Frank

Well, and so five hundredths of a millimeter is super small.

I don’t know why that would have had such a major effect, but it was just enough.

Andy

Well, either way, I’m glad you got it worked out, that’ll be nice to start to print better for you.

Frank

Yeah.

Andy

I’m starting to have booger problems with PETG that’s driving the nuts.

Frank

Oh, more than usual in boogers?

Andy

Well, you know, I tend to find a tissue to wipe my own in, but the printer on the other hand just smears it all over the print.

Frank

Gotcha.

Chris

That’s a kid in the Walmart bathroom.

Andy

Yeah. No kidding.

And also it’s some issues from time to time of having like gaps in layers from printing PETG.

I don’t know what’s going on, and it seems to print, it seems to not be like a layer issue. It’s like part of the print is like raising up or something, it is like delayered and raised up. I don’t know, it’s really kind of weird.

I’ll have to show it to you guys one of these times when I decide to sit down and tackle that problem and show you some of the almost failed prints.

Chris

That sounds almost like a hop in the belt or something.

Andy

No, no, if it de-indexed, you’d definitely know it elsewhere.

Chris

Oh, no, no, because you’re on a ball screw for the Z-Joint, for the Z, huh?

Andy

I don’t have a ball screw. I mean, it is a, what do they call it? It is one of those, but it’s not the ball screw style, it’s the cheaper version.

In fact, my printer is even dumb enough that it has the top of the Z-screw anchored in place.

So if I wind up getting any wobble at all in my Z-screw, I’m going to fill it in the carriage instead of the top of the Z-screw moving about. One of these days, I’m just going to disconnect that bearing, or take the bearing out of the top altogether so that the Z-screw can move around a little bit on the top.

That way the movement is at the top, if there is any, and not at the carriage, but that’s a whole different thing.

Chris

You got a poor printer.

Don’t call it dumb.

Andy

It is a little bit of a Frankenstein.

It’s looking better now that I got this…

Frank

Hey, hey, watch your language.

Don’t bring me into this.

Chris

No, it’s Franken’s stein. It’s that thing in your cupboard.

You know that you put beer in.

Chris

I do think I want to take and put a thermostat on my water cooler though. I haven’t really seen any signs of temperature being an issue, but my cold side of my printer does fluctuate in temperature quite a bit. It’s always cold, and sometimes it’s colder, and I don’t know how much of an impact that’s actually having on the printer itself.

Right now I’ve got it coming out of the peltier, away from the peltier plates going straight to the head. I think I want to make it so the peltier plates go into the reservoir, so temperatures can even out inside the reservoir, and then pull from the reservoir to go into the printer head to keep it cool. That way I’ve got more control over the actual cold side temperature of the printer to see if I can have any benefits or negatives from changing that within a print. Maybe if that is causing any problems or what not.

It’s great to have it be able to be cold like that, especially for wet noodle problems, but I don’t know if too cold might be causing some issues with the extruder itself. Yeah, well it’s not too cold, but it is always below ambient, so there’s that.

Frank

Well, the little bit of research I did in the suggests that those plates are nice, but they’re not really going to get super cold.

Andy

They do.

They’re just so inefficient. They can get really cold.

That’s how we’d get cryo coolers and stuff like that, is using the peltier effect. But it’s at least the ones that aren’t helium based, but they do really good. They just take out so much power to operate.

They’re not efficient at all.

But I think I operate usually around 40 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit on my cold end for the most part. And that’s using the 24 volt power supply from the printer. And I just got two peltier plates in series, so they operate off of about 12 volts. They’re most efficient at that 18 volt level. And I tried splicing in butt converters to bring the 24 down to 18 to try to get them as good as they can. But that started to pull more power than what the printer could put out.

And I didn’t want to do that.

And the 12 volt ones was working fine. I mean, when you look at coolers for your car, our electric coolers are using the same kind of peltiers that only the 14 volts the alternators put now. And they work fine off of that. So the 12 volt ones, they get very cold on the cold side and hot on the hot side.

And so they work.

But my printer was originally designed for the 24 volts to run the bed. And I went and put a have that instead of running the bed, have it run a relay. And then I have 110 volt heater on the bed that gets just switched off and on by the relay. So that gave me the headroom to use that 24 volts elsewhere for the peltier coolers.

Chris

I was going to say, you need something really close to 18 volts. I wonder if you could just straight up wire in a second circuit with one of those old laptop power supplies. I know those run right at 18 volts and you have a good amount of power.

Andy

That is a great thing!

And then just have it relayed instead. That’s a great idea. If I ever need more cooling, I’m going to put that one there on the in the list.

Chris

I’ve got three or four you can have because the connectors on the end broke.

So you’re welcome to ’em.

Andy

I’ve got them too.

I usually just fix the connectors, but I like I like to be able to move the laptop around without having to move the power supply.

So just got power supplies everywhere.

Chris

Oh, yeah, I used to be like that too. And that’s why I have the connector ends broken.

They’re just cheap enough to buy a $5 power supply on eBay. It’s it’s it was more worth my time to just buy a new one than it was to repair the end.

So getting getting thrown into my box of of endless cables.

Andy

Yeah, that’s funny that you say that because right before the podcast, the reason why I was a little bit quite not on time to get I was like two or three minutes early when I tried to be like 10 minutes early is I was trying to finish up fixing my son’s laptop power cable that he had messed up the plug on. And I just had to re solder the wires back to the plug. I was trying to rush on that to come down just, you know, minutes before we started the podcast here. So but no, that’s a great idea for the 18 volts.

frank

Can we take a moment and appreciate that Chris is on a streak?

This is three weeks in a row. He’s put out good information.

Andy

Yeah, you got a very good point.

And I didn’t think about the 18 volt ones that that is a good idea. I don’t think I need that kind of cooling. This is more than plenty. But I do that 18 volts is what’s a great idea.

Chris

Buggidy buggidy.

Andy

I think I’ve got some old Dell, like 80 watt power supplies to that would probably work really well with that because they those peltiers pull a lot of amps.

Chris

And that’s, you know, just as a side note, you know, I’m going to be 3D printing LED lights and things here and there. And it’s really awesome that I can take all of those little those, you know, those USB converters that you get, and they’re kind of useless because now everything is running at or everything’s at like, like two milliamps or whatever. And the first ones are like…

Andy

like 500 milliamps.

Yeah.

Chris

Yeah.

And so I’ve got like three or four of these just hanging around. But the great thing is, is you can just solder a couple of wires to them and run LED lights off of these all day.

Andy

Yeah.

Christ

So they are awesome to set up LED lights somewhere anywhere.

Andy

Yeah.

Chris

Great repurposing.

Andy

Yeah.

Definitely.

They are nice.

Chris

Sorry.

I don’t like to waste electronics.

Frank

You don’t like to waste electrons. What?

Andy

They’re counting them regularly to make sure they’re all accounted for.

Frank

I just heard that the, not to get too political, but there’s people crying about how the Xbox has got a configuration to update at night when there’s less carbon being generated by the power companies.

So that they’re, it’s an effort to be mindful, but also, you know, it’s at night.

What do you care?

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

And politicians are out there losing their minds. First they’re against video games in general, and now they’re against configurations on your Xbox that shouldn’t affect anything as far as your gameplay.

Chris

It’s like they almost don’t remember it.

Frank

It’s too woke.

Chris

Energy stars.

Energy star compliance.

You know, it’s just steps in the right direction to make your power bill less.

You should like that kind of thing, right?

Frank

If it makes sense, it doesn’t apply.

Andy

If it qualifies under those circumstances, it must be a political endeavor.

Frank

“It’s not political guys!” “Well, it is now.”

Well, we had a topic for this week, hindsight solutions, and we’ve actually brushed up against it a little bit.

Is there anything specific that you guys wanted to talk about for hindsight though?

Andy

I don’t think for me personally, I’ve got a couple of things that I had written down that, you know, took me a little while to figure out kind of things. So they felt like they fit like into this category of hindsight solutions because it was, it was a little more than, you know, I’m going to try one or two things and see what works. It was more like, ah, this, this has been giving me a problem for the last couple of months and I’ve tried all these things and finally this worked, you know, I’ve got a couple of those really, but that’s about all I can think of.

Frank

Kind of like me adding five hundredths of a millimeter to my facing.

Chris

Yeah.

Andy

Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. Figuring as long as you’ve been fighting that battle, it’d have been nice if you can just go back and tell a younger Frank, ah, just do this.

Frank

Well, and my problem is, is we talk about going back and telling younger Frank to do something different, even though it’s a month younger Frank, he’s a, he’s still bullheaded. He won’t accept good advice unless he thinks of it himself.

Chris

I was going to say, Franks a bit stubborn like that.

Frank

Yeah, I’m unique in that way Chris.

Kevin

Only inception were a real thing, man.

Andy

Well, to start us off. I’ll go through some of these.

If you’re interested to hear some of those, those kind of successes that came from my end.

Frank

Yeah.

Kevin

Go for it.

Chris

No, we’re not.

Go for it, buddy.

Andy

Frank’s favorite one to make fun of is, uh, adhesion problems. Um, it took me a little while to discover hairspray and nylon or hairspray that had nylon in it. It works really well for me.

I, I remember when I first got the printer, I was always constantly fighting bed adhesion using huge brims and, and, and things like that to try to get it. And I was also trying to print ABS at the time too on a, on a printer that wasn’t enclosed.

So it was kind of just, uh, my printer came with ABS as the starting filament for you to play with an open bed printer. Nobody was thinking through these kinds of things when they, they put my kit together because even today I don’t think I could print anything taller than five or six millimeters out of ABS without getting delayering, you know?

Frank

My biggest question is, how did they get those women’s stockings inside of the hairspray?

Chris

Very carefully.

andy

I don’t know.

Wow. That went so over my head, I think it parted my hair.

Frank

The interesting thing is going to be making sure that there’s enough silence in the recording that everybody goes, did they not get that?

Andy

Give me 10 minutes when Kevin’s talking, if you hear me start laughing, you know, we finally got it.

Frank

Oh.

So, so you’re going to like date it in that respect.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

“You know that Jokey told five years ago, I just got it.”

Andy

So hairspray solved so many of my problems with adhesion. And now, you know, I don’t have to have any kind of raps or anything like that.

I feel like I could print a funnel that goes down to three millimeters, the full size of my bed under that little three millimeter circle, single layer, you know, and keep my adhesion and things like that. So it’s the hairspray just does wonders as well as the whole popping off as it cools down is really nice too.

But I know you guys don’t like it. Yeah, probably that stuff out of my cold dead hands.

Frank

Well, you’re welcome to your wrong opinion.

Frank

I think it’s more that we don’t we don’t need it, you know, and so that’s good.

Andy

Well, I hear that, but then Frank keeps on talking about using rafts all the time.

Frank

Well, that’s true.

So and it’s not all the time. It’s when I have a very small surface area.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

Um, like the inserts For my Dremel tool kit, I don’t need rafts for that, but it’s a big flat surface, bigish.

andy

Yeah.

Frank

Um, but if it’s a very complex surface or something like that, I will use the raft.

Andy

So yeah, I would say that, you know, it depends on the ratio. Like if I have a very small surface to full print size ratio, you want to use a raft for that hands down, I mean, or tape.

Frank

So in other words, you’re right, Andy, I do use rafts rather than the hairspray.

I just I don’t have a problem with spending the extra 10 cents worth of plastic to do it.

Andy

Yeah. Yeah that is good. But that is my point is I don’t have to use any kind of bed adhesion.

Uh, the only time I do use even extra brims to hold apart down is usually when I’m printing nylon and that’s because I don’t have a heated chamber and I’m trying to keep it down, you know, so, but that I think is the only thing I use any kind of the bed adhesion techniques at all. Um, no matter how small the part is or how little of it is touching the build plate with the hairspray, I don’t need any kind of adhesion things at all.

It just prints on the surface itself.

Frank

So so that’s kind of interesting all on its own.

What else is in the hairspray that makes it work versus you’ve identified the hairspray that has nylon as the best hairspray to use.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

Obviously, if it was the only thing that makes that hairspray good, then you could print just regular nylon on your bed plate and not have any trouble, so…

Andy

Well, it’s the nylon helps the plastic stick to the hairspray and then the adhesive in the hairspray sticks to the glass bed.

Frank

Gotcha.

Okay.

Yeah.

That does make sense.

Chris

So having a steel bonder versus a just plastic epoxy, you know, it’s having the right stuff in the glue

Frank

or or even just using less in the way of antifreeze in your car. The farther or the closer to the equator you are because you don’t need it.

Andy

Yeah.

Yeah. That’s true. So that’s why I think it works. I know a lot of people in the community use the aqua, what’s it called aqua something aquanet.

Chris

Aquanet.

Andy

Yeah! That one!

Because it has that technique.

And I found that the rave hairspray from Walmart, the really cheap stuff is formulated very similar. More or less, it’s got the nylon in it, just like Aquanet does. And seems to work just as good for me than the Aquanet, but it’s like half the price too. And I don’t exactly go through it very fast either, but it does seem to work well.

And then when it comes to like cleaning up the bed and stuff like that, I can get 30 or 40 prints off the bed before it starts to get a little bit of a build up, you know, that quarter of a millimeter film over the top from hairspray and just a little bit of water and a paper towel will wipe it all off and you start over from scratch again.

Frank

So Leaving water marks on your bigger flat surfaces.

Andy

Nah. I usually crank the bed up to like 80, 90 degrees Celsius when I do it, so it evaporates things off really nicely.

And then I usually, when I’m all completely done, I’ll hit it with some glass cleaner and to make it all nice and pretty because there’s something neat of just like the brand new bed surface. It just kind of looks good on the printer when it’s brand new.

So I don’t know if you guys have noticed that a lot of the time when I’m taking pictures to show something off to you guys, it’s either on like the counter upstairs on my nice counter tops that I got, or I’ll do it on my print bed after cleaning it up so it looks all nice and pretty and presentable.

Frank

And I use my my craft mat

Andy

and I have noticed that and it looks good while

Frank

and it’s got the measurements on it. So you have immediate understanding of scale too.

Andy

Yeah, that’s a that’s a good point.

So good point.

Chris

I’m just going to take um mine, mine, mine next to a banana.

Andy

that works, but so bed adhesion that was my big one squish for build plate leveling.

That was kind of a changer, you know, I didn’t really have too much of a problem with the bed leveling. It always kind of worked for the most part pretty good. But once I heard somebody talk about ya know “get in the right amount of squish” and you know purposely printing a smaller first layer with the printer squishing out more plastic than that layer would normally take to help with better bed adhesion seems to work really great to.

there is a little bit of a thing might not realize with the size of parts you guys print, but it does give it just a little bit of an elephant foot on that very first layer. You do get that that little bit of a curvature that pokes out from the first layer from it printing like that. But that’s another thing that really helps with bed adhesion to for me.

So that’s why I swear so much by the squish.

Frank

Acknowledging that I’ve probably been using squish without realizing it. I don’t think I would have noticed this elephants foot you’re talking about though because most of my parts have got the fillet.

Andy

Yeah, that’s true. So you wouldn’t notice at all. Got a good point.

Yeah, what is some of the other stuff? um. Oh, proper PID settings for a little while there.

It seemed like my head took a long time for the printer to realize that we were at temperature. My original printer was set up for the hot end to be wrapped with a Keplon tape and fiber glass padding instead of using a silicone sock.

Chris

And so that picture you shared with us that looked like a boxers, you know, wrapped up hand, you know, it was something.

Andy

Yeah and they were they were fun to do too. They took a long time, but God, when you got them done, you put so much work into making it all perfect. And it did seem to hold heat and better than the sock does.

And so that was kind of a little bit of a frustration of wanting to move to the sock because it was so much simpler than having to rewrap the head every dang and time with with the fiberglass and fiberglass is messy to work with anyway.

And yeah, they cut the tape down perfectly to fit and all that it was it was a hard process.

Really wanted to move to the sock.

But then when I would use the sock, the printer would sit there like bouncing around the proper temperature for a long time before it would finally say, “okay, I got it, we’re good to print,” you know, and would begin printing.

It would sometimes take like 30 seconds or so and it was it was kind of a pain in the butt for a while dealing with that. And then I learned how to reconfigure the PID for the head and now any change that I make to the head, I reconfigure the PID that way it can heat the head up properly every time.

And once it gets to the temperature, it sits there for four or five seconds and then it’s done. You know, there isn’t waiting a long time for it to say, “okay, it’s up to temperature now” and it’s, it’s, you know, solid.

So proper PID settings is really important. And moving to direct drive for the TPU. I’ve been fighting the wet noodle problem with TPU every since I bought the darn printer. That’s always been a problem.

And really all it came down to is just getting rid of the Bowden system as much as you possibly can. I had a direct drive head set up that was more kind of like a short Bowden system than it was an actual direct drive.

By short Bowden system, I mean like the Bowden was only like maybe 20 millimeters long. So it was really short and they called it direct drive. You know, the, the feeder motor was on the carriage and all that other kind of stuff. So it was all right there, but now it was still a Bowden system.

And now that I’ve moved down from the very end of the hobbed gear that’s pushing the plastic in to the melt zone of the hot end is only like 15 millimeters on my printer. I don’t think I can get much smaller than that.

Chris

Mine is about 10, somewhere around 10.

And yeah.

Andy

Really?

Chris

Yeah.

It’s, it’s a freaking, it’s really tiny.

Andy

One of these days you’ll have to send me it.

So how does it cool it down then?

How does your cold end cool down or the cold side of your printer?

How does it cool down?

Frank

Um, I think that you’re thinking a different configuration from at least the way I have, if not the way Chris has it.

I’ve got the hot block for the end and then I’ve got about it’s probably 40 millimeters worth of tube that has the heat exchanger fins on it that the fin blows or the fan blows on.

Andy

Okay.

Frank

And at the top of that is where my extruder is mounted.

Andy

Okay.

Frank

So there’s 30 or 40 millimeters between, but there’s not really wiggle room.

And that’s actually where my Bowden tube, the, the little bit that I use lives is inside of that body of the, the part with the heat exchanger.

Andy

Okay.

Have you ever considered going all metal for your, for that part of the heat tube?

Frank

Um, no, I mean, it’s all aluminum except for the Bowden tube.

So what do you mean by all metal, like without any insert in it or?

Andy

Yeah.

There’s no insert. The actual heat tube itself is already the correct diameter.

Frank

I haven’t.

Andy

That’s the systems that I moved to.

So I don’t have any Bowden tube at all.

There’s any of that tube at all for it.

Chris

Ditto, I’ve got no tube at all on mine.

Frank

I do remember kind of having a conversation earlier about, you take something apart and put it back together enough that you start to get a feel for why they made decisions they did in the design process and that sort of thing.

And I do like, as frustrating as it’s been to go through the little bit of Bowden tube that they supplied with the machine, I do like how easy it is to exchange the Bowden tube rather than cleaning, say something that doesn’t have the insert.

Andy

Got a good point.

Frank

And so, um, I think I would rather stick with that design than go to something that would require something more active to clean it out in the event of a clog.

Andy

Yeah.

Nope. Yeah.

That’s a great point to that.

I don’t think I’ve had a problem with it, but I could see if you had some plastic back up into it or something like that, it’d be real pain in the butt to unclog that. So it would be nice to just pull out the Bowden tube and then put a new section back in.

Frank

And I feel like it’s quite a bit quicker, you know, um, every time the Bowden tube has had to come out, I just go and put a new one in it to the right length and yeah.

Chris

And I stick the plastic directly to the feeder gear, you know, um, and my feeder gear is actually is not metal is there, they’re both pla, it’s plastic.

Andy

Really?

Chris

Yeah.

Andy

We’re talking after, after the feeder itself, after the, the hop gears.

chris

So right after the hob gears, yeah, that’s, that’s, uh, I’ve got a brass nozzle there, um, and not in the, and in the hot end and it’s, it’s only like 10 millimeters or so between the, the end of the feeder gear down to the, down to the end of, down to the hot spot.

Frank

To the hot block?

Chris

Yeah.

So, yeah, so.

Andy

No kidding.

Chris

It’s not, it’s not very far.

Andy

You’re going to have to send me a picture of that because that’s cool because I felt like hell to find one that was as short as mine and, and if you got something even better than that, I want to see what it is because like, how would you, what, what are you cooling down on the hot end if it’s so close because that’s why I got to use the water cooling.

I got to cool down the hobbed gear sections because the hobbed gears feed directly into the heat brake pipe. Frank otherwise it’s trying to push basically semi liquefied plastic.

Andy

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, if it’s heating up that close to it, well, I mean, the, the, the, uh, the heat tube isn’t supposed to, uh, to really carry any heat, you know, vertically up to the hobbed gear section.

It’s supposed to stay cold until it hits the, um, the, uh, the, the nozzle, you know, because it’s only really supposed to melt in the nozzle itself, but yep.

Chris

And I mean, that’s what, that’s what mine does is it melts right in the nozzle, everything right up to it is.

Andy

So what are you cooling down on yours?

Does your head even have a fan on it?

Chris

Yeah.

It has a fan on it.

Andy

So where is it blowing? If it’s only like 15 millimeters long?

Frank

He means higher up on the tube, not, not on the, the print area, Chris, but on the apparatus itself to cool off the apparatus.

Chris

Yeah.

It’s just got a, uh, it’s just got a fan that feeds right into the side there. You know, give me just a moment, guys, and I’ll go get you a picture of that.

Andy

Yeah. Yeah.

That would be, that would be good. Yeah.

Let me go grab a tool here.

I’m, I’d love to show you how, how this one works.

I think we’re might be talking about something different than what Chris has set up because there’s like the one I’m describing has no area for a cooling fan to cool down the cold end. Like if you see this here, I’m showing, you can see that there’s

Frank

You’ve got your heat block and right there extruder, it looks like it’s right on top of the heat block.

Andy

Exactly.

It is.

There is no, it only uses the, uh, it uses the, um, the Hobbs and, and stuff as the cold side of the head.

Frank

Okay.

Andy

But if Chris has one that’s even closer, if he’s really got like 10 millimeters, that’s, that’s crazy.

That’s very interesting to me.

Frank

I mean, when I had mine separated, I did realize that the, the heat block had a component, looks like it was pressed in. It wasn’t cast that way, but it looks like it was pressed in or something.

And the fins go over that part. So the Bowden tube actually goes inside it like a socket.

Andy

Okay.

Frank

And there’s a little bit extra room inside of the heat exchanger, but it’s, now that I think about it, it’s twice to three times as long as the, the part that’s pressed into the block.

Andy

Okay.

Chris

Okay.

So yeah, it’s got a heat sink and a fan, right?

So, but yeah, you’re actually, you’re right. It’s actually more like 15 millimeters, but it’s still pretty close.

andy

Oh, that’s insane.

Andy

If you can, let me get a flashlight here.

You can see the little tiny heat sink right before the hot end and then the hobbed gear.

Frank

Yeah. That is a really small heat sink.

Andy

And so looking at it now, it’s probably actually like 20 millimeters from the end of the hobbed gear to the nozzle. This is one of the, one of the smallest ones I could, the shortest distance I could find.

And that’s why one of the reasons why I water cool this, because cooling this sucker down, I mean, there’s not a lot of tube where you would, you know, be able to cool the filament down before it goes into the hot end.

Frank

I do feel like Chris’s heat block is a lot longer than I expected to though. Like it looks like it’s twice as deep as yours and mine is. So it’s got, it’s got longer that the plastic…

Andy

Oh, okay.

So he does have an, he does have an entire heat sink there.

Chris

Yep.

Andy

So that’s maybe like 30 millimeters or so. That’s still really close, but

Chris

Yeah, it’s not that 10 millimeters I was saying.

Andy

Yeah.

Yeah. For some reason I was seeing that, I was seeing that different in my head when we were talking about that.

Frank

So your, your extruder is mounted above the fan. So it’s probably safe to assume that the, the fan that your extruder is mounted on top of that whole block is probably the length of your heat exchanger.

Andy

Yeah.

Chris

Yep.

Andy

Okay.

Frank

And if it’s not, you’ve got a lot of room for flex before it gets down to your heat block.

Chris

Yep.

But it’s really nice.

Andy

I like your setup.

Chris

Yeah.

I do wish that the hub gear was not made of plastic, but it hasn’t given me any issues yet. So.

Andy

That’s good.

I used to run one similar to that setup that wasn’t one piece like yours, but it was still geared down like the way yours is with the plastic gear.

And it never, it never wanted to give me any problems either.

Frank

It looks like your drive gear is plastic Chris, but the hub part itself is metal

Andy

And I could see the back behind there that does look like a flywheel. So it is just like single-sided driven, but yeah, hey, you know, if it’s not popping on you or anything like that and working great, that’s all that really matters.

Frank

Yeah.

I can agree with that.

Andy

If I had that kind of system set up, I may not have tried so hard to get what I’ve got going on here with, with these.

Chris

Like I said, when I was choosing my printer, I went with a couple, I looked at a couple of different Reddit forums and after seeing what people had to say on a couple other forums also, I went with the artillery because of that.

andy

Yeah, that’s good.

That is good.

Chris

Like I said, it’s going to be the easiest system with the least amount of problems for you to get figuring out 3D.

Andy

That’s good.

Frank

I originally tried to buy a system that looked like it was going to be easy to deal with and went through two that I returned and decided to go with a different model and got this one.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

And I can only imagine where I would be now if one of the other ones had worked out.

Andy

You’re talking about being geared down and I did run into a problem. This one here is highly geared down because it uses such a small stepper motor. But I did find out that there’s a max speed that this can push through before it just, the motherboard cannot send a signal fast enough to push it down. I can get about 30 millimeters a second of movement out of this motor and it won’t go any faster. So when it comes to like printing or so, I probably, if all other reasons were fine, I could probably only print it maybe 180 to 200 millimeters a second and that’s about it with a.6 nozzle.

If I went to like a 1 or 2 millimeter nozzle, well, I don’t think it would be able to go much faster than like 50 to 100 millimeters a second.

Chris

So maybe the hindsight solution is maybe just start with a direct drive.

andy

Yeah, that is true. I don’t think too many printers are made like with the pure Bowden systems, except maybe Delta printers, but if you buy a Delta, you’re using it in a different way.

Frank

There are still a lot of Bowden systems in use though, like most of the videos I see online are people that are using Bowden systems on their printer.

But yeah, I can agree that I don’t know that there’s a whole lot of current iterations of models that have direct or that have the Bowden. I know that like cruelty still sells the versions one and two of the CR-10. And those have got the Bowden systems on them.

Andy

So that CR-10 was a workhorse of a printer for a long time.

Frank

Well and mine is just cranking it out.

You know, imagine if it was less robust, the issues that I’ve been having would have been so much more of a pain and what they have been, but this thing is just bulletproof, you know.

Chris

So much so that some guy converted it into a spray painter.

Frank

Yeah, I’ve seen that and I’ve seen conversions to a mill. Where they take a Dremel tool and mount it on the carriage and mill like that.

And it’s like, you know, if I was more ambitious with this, I might try that myself.

Andy

Oh, have you guys seen Alan Wrenches, a little cut out knob like this?

Kevin

Yep.

Andy

I love these.

I want to find a set of these because you can like use it at any angle.

It’s so awesome.

Frank

Yeah, that’s by design.

Chris

And Andy just barely discovered this.

Wow… Wow.

Frank

I thought you were kind of a car guy there, Andy, apparently not.

Andy

Not really. I also just like bought tools that didn’t have this design and just always used my same tools all the time.

Frank

Fair.

If it works, there’s no reason to replace it.

Chris

Yeah, when you buy the cheap sets, you don’t get the bells and whistles.

Andy

Yeah. But I think I want to get a set of these that are balled off like this and I know they can strip out. I don’t know if I could just cut that.

Andy

Yes, you can always try that.

In fact, one of my favorite things..

Andy just remembered that he’s got a grinder.

Andy

I got a grinder.

I’m going to make my tools better or not so good.

Frank

Well, as long as you don’t cut through it too many times.

Chris

So one of my favorite things to do before I, well, one thing I used to do before I got the hex head set for my drill, the quarter inch, any size, full set hex, I would take the Allen key that came with the put it yourself together furniture and I would chop the yell off of it with my grinder and then just put that into my drill and assemble the furniture with my drill like that.

Andy

Sounds good.

That’s a good way to do it.

Frank

I would. Yeah. I accept that.

Andy

I definitely approved.

Chris

But now I just take the whatever hex wrench they supply and go go down to my toolbox and get the one out of my set and go, okay, yeah, that’s the right size. Let’s go.

Andy

During this whole thing, I went and grabbed my tool set that I used for my printer and I had welded a socket to an old screwdriver perfectly for my nozzles to make them easy to get off. And then it was like a week later, I switched to the 0.6 nozzles and it doesn’t work anymore.

Chris

That’s why I said get one of those ones that has the interchangeable hex dillies on them.

Yeah.

Andy

Yeah. But I wanted it all to be really tight and, you know, that was perfect one there.

I just kind of changed the socket on it. I got a box of sockets that you’ll throw away sockets or when I’m out at work walking on the road and you see that random 10 millimeter somebody lost, I’ll usually pick it up the pocket it and throw it in the box when I get into my shop next and then whenever I need a specific weird tool like this, I got the extra parts to just be able to weld together to whatever I want.

Chris

So Andy’s were all our 10 millimeter sockets are disappearing too.

Kevin

I was just going to say that.

Andy

I found… I’ve got a lot of them.

Frank

And he’s a pseudo hoarder, you know, some things he just doesn’t let go of and some things he doesn’t care about. He’ll let it go in a heartbeat.

Andy

Unless it’s related to data in any way, I do actually have a hoarding problem with data. But since nobody sees it, is it really a problem?

Frank

Yes.

The answer to that is yes.

There’s like a mental health problem at that point still and mental health issues are not so painfully obvious for the most part.

So I say, I shouldn’t say all.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

But yeah.

Andy

Um, anyway, those were my hindsight solutions I came up with. You guys got any ones that you found?

Chris

Yeah, actually, I needed to make a specialized stamp for for Christmas and I’m just moving it forward to for Christmas this coming year.

I realized after needing it going, you know, I could have made a stamp with this custom keychain program because this custom keychain program that you have raised letters on a on a, you know, on a keychain base sort of thing. And if I print that out of TPU and then mirror it on in the slicer, then it’s a stamp. So going to be doing that for for fun things to do for this Christmas.

Frank

Hey, Chris, um, since you’re in there playing with fusion, you can do that real easy at the CAD level and you’re not beholden to a specific shape.

Chris

Oh, I know this is not a it’s not a specific shape. It actually reshapes the whole thing based on what font you use so you can use any font at all as long as it’s installed on your computer. And this thing will make any any words, whatever you type into it.

So you type in whatever word you want, whatever font you want, and then you can say it lets you change the size of the whole nine yards. So it’s a it’s a preset program all 100% ready to go.

So it’s not bad.

Frank

I would use my CAD program for that, but I guess I’m weird.

Andy

While back with the kids, we sat down and made some stamps and just used a big pen and blew the ink out into a sponge and made it that way with a cap over the stamp kind of situation. And you know what, they work perfect. That’s a neat thing to do is to make stamps like that with TPU.

Chris

So yeah, I’m looking back at that going. That is incredibly easy to do and I am going to go forward with it. But yeah, so there’s that.

There’s the I wish I had figured out the pause at height function sooner too so I could switch out colors, but you know, it’s less important for me than it is for, you know, people printing figurines and things that have to be that need to be different colors here and there.

Andy

Well, that’s when you see some of the different color things that you have printed.

That’s not one thing I’ve played with, to be honest.

Frank

That’s when you get a get a printer that has two or more extruders.

Andy

Get like an IDEX or something.

Chris

Yeah.

But then again, money.

Frank

Well, and I know most of the hobbyists like Kevin, I’m sure we’ll just choose a maybe a matte color for their figurine and then just plan on painting it anyway.

Kevin

Yep.

Frank

So

Chris

true.

Frank

And that’s half of the fun, right?

Kevin

Yeah.

Chris

But yeah, I do like playing with all the different colors, you know, I can I can print with.

So

Kevin

I mean, printing with different colors can be fun too.

Frank

Kind of hard to do with SLA though, I imagine.

Kevin

Yeah.

I was going to do some multicolored lattice bells, never got around to it.

But what that in that, what that would require is you have to you have to pay attention to where it is and then pause the print and then empty out the resin that clean it up real well, and then put the next color that you want it in there and then resume the print.

Frank

And hope that the Z goes back, right? Because you’re pulling out the whole vat, aren’t you to clean it?

Or can you get with something in it?

Kevin

No, no, you have to pull it out.

Frank

Okay. Yeah, that sounds like you’re opening the door for it to not to return to the same level.

A couple of times.

Kevin

But it’s got guides in it for you to align your your vat.

So I don’t think it would be that big of a deal.

Andy

And the FEP gives you a little bit of a way of where the vat sets to, right? Like if it’s half a millimeter taller than it was before, that amount of air is taken up with the FEP, isn’t it?

Kevin

I don’t know about that. I just always make sure to have it sitting firmly in the guides, but anytime I do it.

I mean, because if putting the resin vat back in is really that big of an issue that it would cause misalignment when you go to resume the print, it would cause misalignment anytime you go to do a new print.

Andy

You got a point.

Chris

Good point.

Kevin

Because you have to take the resin vat out between prints so that you can empty it and check for anything that might have fallen onto the FEP and anything else that might ruin your your print in the future.

Andy

So that makes sense.

Chris

It does still sound quite a bit more tedious than simply pulling out a filament and putting a new line in, you know.

Frank

Well, I guess my comment still goes back to my other point of the more evolutions, I guess. You put into the process the better the chance that something is going to fail. And that’s why I really try to avoid changing filament in the middle of the print anyway, because that’s going to be the failure point If I do. I would rather plan on doing like a figurine the full color and either deal with it all being one color or plan on painting it, which..

Chris

it’s not an issue for me.

Frank

I don’t have the drive to paint my figurines like some people.

Andy

I’ve stopped at layer heights before to insert nuts and things like that to have, you know, threaded inserts that aren’t threaded inserts kind of thing.

Frank

Sure.

Andy

And it always seems like whenever you pause, there’s always a visible change right there in the plastic.

Frank

You can see where you stopped.

Andy

No matter what you do.

Frank

Yeah.

Chris

I haven’t had that issue either.

Andy

Nice.

Well, if you’re changing color, it kind of makes sense because there’s a big color change right there. So you might not see anything.

Chris

Well, I mean, like there’s no, there’s there’s no actual

Frank

there’s no ledge or anything where…

Chris

ledge or anything. It’s still just as smooth as everything as the rest of the print, you know.

Frank

So I haven’t tried it since I switched over to the five layers per millimeter instead of four.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

I wonder if because the resolution is enough higher, I wonder if it would be as obvious for me as it has been in the past.

Chris

That’s that’s a good point. I’ve been printing almost everything at .16.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

Well, has anyone got anything else that we haven’t talked about?

They want to get out there.

I know I kind of talked about all my stuff while we were leading up to the topic.

So yeah.

Andy

Not, really.

I think that’s all the things that I could think about that were like really big game changer changing solutions that took you a while to figure out, you know, when it comes to the printer.

There’s some in software, but I think that’s a little different. When it comes like designing the part and stuff like that is as I was learning how to use the software better, made more sense and I should have been doing that the whole time kind of thing.

Yeah.

Chris

We’ve we’ve already discussed. Don’t over design it.

Yeah.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

It’s still still hard to not make that mistake.

Andy

Yeah.

Chris

Our shop teacher would be very proud of how simple you’re keeping it, even though in your head you’re screaming, I should add this, I should add that.

Frank

I want to, I could, I should, yeah.

And that’s just it, right?

It’s always easier to add more design features, not necessarily so easy to remove design features if you don’t like them.

Andy

Yeah.

No kidding.

Frank

Unlike with wood where it’s always easier to take it off than it is to put it on.

Andy

That is true.

You’ve come with a different skill set with your woodworking to this.

Frank

Well, if you guys don’t mind, I think now it’s time to call it.

Andy

Sounds good.

Kevin

Yep.

Chris

Don’t mind. I haven’t been thinking at all.

Frank

That sounds about right, Chris.

Chris

It’s far from the course on me.

Frank

Well, we’d like to thank everyone for listening to the very end.

If you like what you hear, please give us all the stars and subscribe.

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If you have feedback or if you have content requests, please let us know.

You can find this in our Facebook group, Amateur 3D Pod, or you can email us at panelists at amateur3dpod.com.

And if you really want to, you can reach out to us individually at Franklin, Kevin, Andy, or Chris at amateur3dpod.com.

The music in this episode was written by Kevin Buckner.

And we are now going to have transcripts for the episode linked in the description.

Actually, if there’s always been a transcript, then I have successfully gone back and added them to past episodes.

The heavy lifting for the writing of those transcripts has been completed by OpenAI’s WhisperAI.

Our panelists are me, Franklin Christensen, and my friends, Kevin Buckner, Chris Weber, and Andy Cotum.

And until next time, there you go.

Sign off are ya suckers, is that what you say?

Chris

Yep.

Frank

Okay.

Go for it, Chris.

Chris

Sign off are ya suckers.

Frank

And until next time, we’re going offline.

Kevin

Keep your FEP tight.

Andy

There you go.

Chris

Googoly, googoly.