Frank
Thank you for joining us.
This is episode 71 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, Chris Weber, Andy Cottam,
and Kevin Buckner.
Kevin
Oh
Frank
Our plan was to start at 8am this morning, and we made it to almost nine due to technical
difficulties.
Chris
Yeah, yeah, my, my net internet service provider can’t get anybody out here till Tuesday to fix mine. So, yes.
Frank
Well, and I guess realistically, before we shot for 10 and started at closer to 11.
So that’s about par for the course.
Kevin
Right, right. Yep
Andy
Yeah, that’s true.
So if anybody’s questioning Chris’s audio, that’s the reason he’s on a different setup for today.
Frank
He’s calling in this week.
Chris
Yep, I’m calling in for this episode.
Frank
Which is funny.
Well, kind of funny.
Chris
Okay.
Frank
His video shows him using his phone, instead of coming from his phone.
Andy
How are you doing that.
Oh, okay.
Chris
Oh, yeah, I’m using my tablet.
Frank
Ah!
And your tablet.
Gotcha.
Andy
Gotcha.
Chris
Yeah, my tablet’s paired with the nicer headset, so.
Frank
That was a little weird.
I didn’t expect to see your phone.
Anyway, yeah, we talked about some stuff and completely avoided talking about other
stuff.
Andy
Yes, which is hard to do as a group getting ready for the podcast and 3D printing really is something we enjoy to do and like to talk about.
It’s hard to avoid right before the podcast.
It’s always that thought your head, save it for the podcast, save for the podcast.
Frank
Well, and honestly, I think that’s why you at least have started adding notes into the
thread saying, hey, I want to talk to Kevin about this.
Andy
Yes, yes.
Frank
Just to get it out of your head and not lose it.
Andy
Otherwise it keeps rattling around up there.
It’s all good.
Frank
So do you remember the questions because you didn’t prep Kevin at all?
Kevin
Right
Andy
Oh, yeah. Yeah, so I do.
I finally decided to I got a bin for my resin printer to be able to store my old alcohol and and it’s got a nice seal top on it.
It’s about the same size as the bins.
And you can see that it’s it’s starting to get nasty.
I’m starting to get my own nasty little alcohol here.
Frank
Just a little foggy.
Andy
And yeah, and, you know, when I was doing all the research for this and stuff, I found a lot of people using a two tier system for their alcohol, like a pre wash with the old alcohol.
And so I figured I would I would go ahead and go that route to so I can, you know, have cleaner alcohol to wash stuff in it seems to be important for others.
So I’ll go ahead and start doing that.
But then I kind of fell down the trap of, oh my gosh, rubbing alcohol is expensive.
And I didn’t get too many prints out of this before it got that dirty.
Now, apparently I just need to start wiping stuff down a lot better before washing it, all that, but you know, it did get dirty pretty quick.
And I was looking at ways to be able to clean your alcohol. Do you clean your alcohol at all, Kevin?
Kevin
I do.
Andy
What’s your method?
So what excuse me what any cubic said
in their user manual was that when you are when you feel like your alcohol is too
messy to let it sit undisturbed for a day or two and then and let all of the
resin that’s bound up that’s floating in the in the alcohol to settle out and
then you decant the alcohol into another container and wipe up the sludge
that’s at the bottom of the original container
Okay.
I found a lot of people trying to filter it. A lot of people trying to cure the alcohol, which leads to sludge, which is pretty funny.
But there was one video out there that I haven’t seen anybody else address where the guy puts alum into it, and the alum attaches to everything and it just falls down to the bottom.
I see all these people like filtering and they’re able to like filter out and get their alcohol fairly pretty clean,
but they only got like half of it or to a third of it left, you know.
But this one guy doing this method, the alum has to,
it doesn’t mix with alcohol, so you mix it with water, just a little bit of water, and that way the alcohol can mix with the alum.
And then it settles out all, like it makes it clean, clean, absolutely clean, and it settles out and you decant that off.
And then you take and you salt the alcohol to separate what water is left in the alcohol back out, and then you decant again, and you’re left with like 80% of pure clean alcohol again.
And it was, it was impressive compared to the other videos I was seeing so I bought some alum, and I’m going to experiment with that down the road once it gets a little bit dirtier because I just barely started that’s not too dirty.
But I’m going to keep on going with that until and then I’ll give that a shot and see how that goes that would be kind of a fun video that does work.
It made me want to get my big camera out for when I do it so that I can take a time lapse of it, you know, all of the, the resin falling to the bottom.
So, that’ll be kind of fun.
Frank
And me, the knucklehead that I am was thinking, build a centrifuge.
Andy
You could do that.
McKenna would definitely take the alums not expensive and salts not expensive so it’s it’s not too big of a like costly thing to do.
I think I will be able to for 10 bucks. That gives me like 20 times of being able to clean it out. So that’s that’s not expensive.
Salt’s not expensive so there was that.
Frank
But I want to see you build a centrifuge.
Andy
Especially when I’ve been working with motors lately and they’ve been all scary and stuff.
So, I do want to talk about or talk to Kevin here I did run into an odd problem. Let me see if I can get this over here so we can see it.
This is the, the turbine that I was talking about.
First off, if you listen to my past, though, our last episode, I was making a very bad error in what I was calling fans.
I was using the word turbine to describe an impeller.
I did a lot of research after our last podcast to see what kind of a fan setup would be best for making a vent system so I can vent the air out of my 3D printer and some of my projects like when I’m soldering and stuff like that.
It would be nice to have a floating hose that I can use as an air vent.
And so I’m building that that’s the project now and I was looking into what kind of fans to use for this.
My, my very first thought was just to use a prop, a normal fan blade and make a ducted fan for it.
But the static pressures are really low for a ducted fan and I don’t want a big tube.
I want a smaller tube. I want about two inches in diameter, not like four inches.
That way it’s easier to move around and stuff, but that’s a lot more static.
You need a lot more static pressure for that.
And so a ducted fan probably wouldn’t be the best idea.
And I was calling what I was looking for and a turbine and that’s not the right word, it’s an impeller.
And I learned a few things because I was asking last time, you know,
like I have no idea what the difference between an impeller is and like a squirrel cage fan, you know, for a centrifugal fan.
And I can’t find anything that tells you like, here’s the good usages for these different kind types of fans and why they would use it in these scenarios.
I learned one kind of neat thing, this style of fan,
both a squirrel cage and all the way up to what you would find in your vacuum is just called an impeller, it’s a pneumatic impeller.
And there’s levels of it, like the ones you find in your vacuum.
The one I’m showing here is a full enclosed impeller that I built.
And this is, it’s far to one side of this spectrum of impeller that you can, you can make.
It’s got a cover over the fan blades themselves, the entire cover spins that way,
the air is not fighting the case that it’s in when it’s rubbing against one side of the case.
And as you go, as you go toward the other side of the spectrum,
you’ll see the fan blades that creep up the center of the post will dive back down until they’re almost flat.
That’s what we see in like our computer blower style fans.
And then as you continue to go past the spectrum, you’ll see it open up even further all the way till you get the squirrel cage like blowers.
It’s all the same kind of fan, it’s just a different spectrum of it.
And they, one side does one thing, the other side does another thing and everywhere in between is, is where you, you know, where you get your spectrum.
So that’s why there’s not really a comparison between different styles because they’re not different styles, they’re just different versions of it.
And so since what I’m making is a little bit closer to a vacuum is what I want.
I want a small, poor vacuum that I could use to, you know, as a vent.
And so I decided to go with a fully enclosed because something that’s fully enclosed allows a lot more error when I’m setting it up inside of a case.
I don’t have to have really fine precision with the blades against the housing and stuff like that when the entire.
Frank
So you don’t have to worry about interference and that sort of thing with the housing.
Andy
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Frank
Because then if things start to fly apart.
Andy
So this is a little bit easier to build a fully enclosed one.
And the one that I decided to go with was just a full impeller, which was kind of similar to what I found that Dyson uses in theirs.
You guys know how I love Dyson’s R&D stuff.
So they definitely did their research.
So I kind of modeled a fan off of them and then made that fan fully enclosed because the Dyson one is not fully enclosed.
It’s not an open fan or it’s not enclosed.
I don’t know how to explain it.
Frank
It doesn’t have the cover over the top part.
Andy
Yeah, yeah, there’s no cover.
That’s a better way to describe it.
So I printed this and it came out good.
You guys saw my pictures.
It looks like an impeller and all that other kind of stuff.
I did discover from kind of, yeah, when it’s upside down.
Chris
Yeah, it looks like the space needle.
Frank
So you don’t have to worry about interference and it doesn’t have the cover over the top
Andy
So one question I had with Kevin is I noticed that my model, like you can see when I spin this, it wobbles a lot.
And it is like the way the nut fell through the center was perfect.
I had to press it in with a little bit of pressure.
It couldn’t have been better.
And then on the back end where the threads come through were interference threads.
So I kind of, it cut a little bit into the plastic threads as I was screwing it in because the hole was just a little bit too tight, which for something like this is perfect.
It couldn’t have been better with the measurements.
But why the hell is it so wobbly?
I don’t understand that.
And I got lines in it.
Like you can see these lines here, Kev.
And they’re along the horizontal plane that it was printed in.
And so I was curious if you’ve ever seen that before and might know what happened to my print.
This is like for supporting or what like you can see it’s it’s it comes.
It’s out of proportion right here.
It’s on flat on this side.
And then it bends up along those lines.
Kevin
Yeah, I’ve seen similar things happening with mine and with kind of hard
I’m trying to go full screen here to get a good view.
Yeah, that that looks to me like there was something wrong with your
supports and that it that they were a bit too wobbly when it was printing
Andy
Okay.
Okay, that would make sense.
And you can see my little support.
I put supports all along the bottom here, but I only put a couple right across the center of the top here and the rest was floating.
So maybe that’s what it was.
So I just I just fell to support it better.
Kevin
If you give me a second, I will show you when I when I printed the
Pasta disk that I haven’t tested yet
I will show you what my supports on that looked like and
You’ll probably crap a brick
Andy
Yeah, I would be interested in seeing this because for what I what I did I probably used 15-20 supports to support this medium supports.
I also learned something kind of neat.
My printer, when I connect it up to my network in Chitubox, I have an option to send a printer, which I didn’t know.
And so I was kind of playing around with it last night.
And my printer’s got internal memory, and I can send a job to the printer, but it’s not printing it from my computer.
It’s like sending the file over to the printer.
And then I can tell my printer to print it if it’s ready to set up or I can come down and I can print it from the internal memory, that kind of thing.
Chris
Kind of nice to have a little cache, isn’t it?
Andy
So yeah, yeah, it’s some, you know, I was I was considering a while back for my printer down here, the FDM printer of getting one of those.
Have you guys heard of the ifi SD cards back in the day, it was an SD card that had a network adapter in it.
And you can connect the SD card up to your network and I-Fi software would then like backup your photos or something.
And a lot of people have made cards similar to this, but they come up as a network storage device.
And those are really neat.
And I was thinking that would be fun to get one of those to put in the printer, because then I can just save it to the network storage device, which would be that memory card that’s currently in the printer.
Because I like being down in front of the printer when I go to start it.
And I don’t like running jobs through a cable to the printer. I would much rather have it stored on the printer itself.
And that was kind of like a middle grounds to the whole sneaker-net thing, a wireless sneaker net.
But, but yeah, so Kevin show my gosh, that’s a lot of stuff. Oh, wow.
That’s really what it takes?
Kevin
In my experience, yeah
Andy
Okay. Okay.
So listeners, the his disk has got what like 60 or 70 supports attached to the bottom of the disk.
Frank
Many, many times many.
Kevin
Lots lots and lots
Andy
Okay, you would have laughed at what I sliced yesterday last night.
It was not a lot.
Frank
So Andy, there’s another thing that comes to mind and it’s from a more mechanical perspective.
For a long time, the engineering of mechanical things has had some fluctuation.
It’s really hard to account for and it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about like tires or drive shafts or anything like that.
And what they’ll do is they’ll get it as close as they can in production and then they’ll add weights to balance it.
Andy
Oh yeah, well you saw in my video of this spinning at scary fast speeds. It’s about I got it balanced.
I did the whole tape method. And then after I did the tape method, I took a drem…
You can see my cuts from the dremel right here, where I cut off some material to kind of balance it.
So it’s balanced. It does work. And you saw in the video, it sucks pretty good to it. It’s, I’m impressed with it.
Frank
Yeah, man, it just sucks.
Andy
It sucks awful.
Andy
But so I’m good. I would like to try to reprint this because the motor I’m using is an RC plane motor. And I love these, these brushless motors, they’re awesomely powerful.
But it’s only got one little bearing in the back for the entire motor.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, right now just spinning this, it doesn’t feel wobbly. There’s, there’s very little vibration in the motor itself in the, in the, the back of the motor that I’m holding.
When I do spin it, it fills pretty smooth.
But visually, you could just see it’s all over the place, but that’s that’s because I spent some time in balancing it.
And over the place like this, this will be a little bit harder to, I’ll have to be more forgiving when I go to make a housing for it.
So if I reprint a new one, go a little bit insane on the supports like Kevin was shown to do.
Hopefully it’ll be flatter and will spin a little bit more round.
I was actually attempting to make this just a little bit smaller because the, the diameter of my impeller is a little bit bigger than the bed on my printer.
But if I make it just a, it’s 80 millimeters. So if I make it like 75 millimeters, I should actually be able to just print it flat.
And I might give that a shot and see how that goes.
Because then all I would have to worry about an elephant foot around the edges that I can compensate for in the model to some degree.
And that would probably be flowing.
Frank
I was just going to say, I feel kind of bad for you because you spent so long printing and fighting against the idea of supports.
And then you got a 3D printer that almost requires absurd amounts of supports just to get a good print.
Andy
Yes, kind of, kind of.
So one of the things I was looking at last night when I was considering like, okay, this model is, I didn’t build it to not use supports because an impeller, I got, I had three splines to make up the, just one fin, three different dimensions of splines to make up that pattern.
So it’s, it’s complicated. I’m not worrying about supports because the model is so complicated.
But the way it comes out, it doesn’t require supports if printed facing straight up except the bridged parts for the, yeah.
But a while back with the resin printer, I printed one of these cubes for the resin printer.
It’s got a lot of light test, you know, test shapes and stuff on it.
But I was looking this over and because it had no supports to print this at all.
And it was printed flat, you can see my elephants, but it was printed flat.
But parts like this overhang right here are completely not supported and came out beautiful.
And that that’s a bridge.
And this bridge is like three times larger, but it makes me want to possibly try.
But another thing I noticed that blew my mind in this cube is this little spot right here.
This overhang, this is a 90 degree overhang.
There was no supports to print that and it turned out great.
Look at that. This amazing. So it’s like, I’m kind of starting to learn like SLA can you like this really this you could not print this on FDM at all this this corner it’s
I think of a.
Frank
Especially because the one part is floating, you can print that on.
Andy
Yeah, it’s completely floating and it printed beautifully it’s nice and square on the bottom.
And, and it looks like it may have missed two or three layers at the very beginning but the layers are so small you can’t see that with your eye.
And mechanically that would be fine for anything I make it so.
Frank
My biggest worry with that sort of thing would be if it doesn’t get picked up ever, then you’ve got a blind spot on the FEP.
But otherwise.
Andy
Andy
Yeah, it’s it’s really interesting how well that works if you imagine it was printed like this coming up so upside down but to have that just overhang like that and just have it work that blows my mind that it came out that good.
Frank
Right, right.
And I say it’s an overhang, but it’s still connected to the back too.
So it’s not like a complete overhang and I can see how that would differ in an SLA than it would be with an FDM because you’re stroving in space for around a corner with FDM.
Right.
And because because the SLA is connected, at least to the back of the diagram, that might be enough strength to pick up the blind spot as it were.
Andy
Yeah.
So, to do bridging, does it help if you lift higher on your prints to enable the fact to pull free before a bridged component like that.
Kevin
Not in my experience the default lift height is has always been
Enough to pull them the model free from the FEP
Andy
Okay, I might try shrinking this down just a little bit and giving the shot because if I can if I can print this out, like the way this one came out, dimensionally accurate.
That would be great and this would this should be pretty balanced right off the bat and this wasn’t even that hard to balance. I made like three cuts, kind of etched in on the back here, and that’s all it took to balance it and you saw it spinning.
But, but yeah, so there was that I did this is also printed with that ABS 2.0 resin, and I was I was kind of playing with the supports on on these.
My model or my instructions told me to save, have a couple of small chunks of supports that you can save.
That way, if you get a failed print, you can expose the whole bed and do a peal off the theft, but it’s really good if you put an old support on to the theft before doing it that way you got something to be able to pull up on.
So I’ve got a couple of supports I just been saving for that thing.
But the, when I was talking to you last week about the fragility of the resin that I got, I tried getting some ABS like plas, er, uh, resin.
And this stuff here, the old stuff just shatters you can see it just shatters really easy and breaking spaghetti and the ABS stuff here now these are supports and they’re very thin but check this out it’s just bendy.
This is this is exactly what ABS would feel like if it was a what’s it called a a formed piece of ABS.
I’m impressed with this stuff.
This is neat and it’s only like 3��3or4 more.
I think I paid like $23 for a kilogram of it.
So, as far as like making mechanical stuff and finding plastics that work for mechanical stuff.
ABS is something I would love to be able to use all the time if it worked better in the FDM printer I would use it all the time.
But you know PETG is kind of as close as you can get with ABS that works well and PETG is great but I fight the stringiness all the time because it’s so hard to dial in all the time to make it perfect.
So I just kind of deal with the stringiness when it comes and goes and to be able to have a filament like this that’s just like ABS that’s that’s amazing.
So, I don’t I don’t really got any worries about this breaking at me breaking on me at even high speeds.
However, you ain’t going to see me holding the motor plane with the high speeds I’ll wait till it’s inside of the inside of a housing to crank it up to see what my upper limit should be for this motor because you saw it at 20% it was already kind of scary.
Frank
I don’t believe it.
Andy
And you don’t believe it.
Frank
I don’t believe it.
You, you don’t take precautions like that.
You can’t lie to me.
Andy
No, no, I saw how fast I had it cranked up before.
After that video I took I did bring it up to 25%, but I was afraid of holding it out in front of me like this having it shatter and having it hit me with pieces.
So it was kind of scary to hold on to but power might be a problem for this motor.
This is designed to be run the ESE on these motors are designed to be run off of, you know, a battery power supply.
And the one I’ve got is 30 amps that can run this motor and at running it with the impeller on it at 10 per 9% takes a full amp at 12 volts.
And it seems like when I went up into the 20% range, we were up at like three amps of power and the power supply I want to use for this project is a two amp power supply.
So and when it was spinning at 25%, that was that was fast scary fast.
I, and a lot of side can’t it’s hard to tell the suction but the air coming out of it was pretty excessive it was a lot more than my Dyson puts out for the output.
So I don’t think I will be going faster than that 25% or so so you know being limited to two amps might be just fine for this but but we’ll see anyway that’s the that’s the project right now.
Frank
And having a system that works at 10% efficiency is going to make all your parts last longer.
Andy
Yeah, that is true.
Frank
10% of it’s rated proficiency anyway.
Andy
The motors only supposed to be pushing around little tiny airplane prop and this is quite a bit more weight so I think my failure point for all of this is going to be the bearing in the motor.
But I think I’m going to give it a shot. These bearings are also once that I can replace easy enough.
These motors are already cheap I paid, I think it was like eight bucks for the motor and the ec combined.
So they’re not they’re not really expensive, but I bet I could find a package of those bearings for pretty cheap if I do.
If it does go out after a year of use or so, then it might be worth replacing but if it goes out in like six months or so then I should probably just switch to something a little bit reliable like a ducted fan, even though it doesn’t have the static pressure that I want it would do the static pressure that I need, because I
don’t need a lot but be nice to have a high performance vacuum attached to the window if I can right.
Plus there’s a lot of learning here in designing my own impeller and making a housing for and stuff a ducted fan is just it’s easy, but this this is a little tougher we’ll do this.
We’ll learn something new.
But that’s that’s the project I’m working on now. I’ve been running the the FDM printer a lot my son.
I got a deal with my 10 year old he because he’s he’s modeling now he’s using Windows 3D builder, which is kind of like a primes based very low level kind of design software and
Frank
Somewhere between the Windows 3D designer and an actual CAD program.
Andy
yes, yes, yes, and I just barely installed.
What CAD software do you use Frank?
Frank
Fusion 360.
Andy
Yes, that’s the one. Yes, I did install Fusion 360 on the computer downloading the installation was hard. What is it with websites only working with the Chrome browser and not working with anybody else.
Frank
I run into that issue periodically, something doesn’t work.
I don’t like it. I think it’s stupid that Firefox for all of their dynamic ability has the things that make it so it doesn’t load properly.
Andy
And
And it’s it’s weird the way it responds to because I’m a Firefox user is my default browser.
But, you know, so when I went to go download it, it popped up an error saying unable, you know, it was unable to create a 360 license and try again later that definitely sounds like an internal error on their side.
And I tried it after looking I tried it on edge and came up with the same error. And then I was frustrated I was trying to get it for my son so I went and was kind of googling the error and found somebody saying yeah once I tried it with Chrome it worked fine so okay
I just threw up Chrome and sure enough it works just fine on Chrome. Just weird. And then just to be curious I went back to the Firefox one and it was still failing so.
Frank
So, because it is a cloud software, software is a service type software.
I think when I encountered that, I went into their system and created a profile in the system and then downloaded it while that profile was active and it was fine.
I haven’t had to change my browser in downloading it. You remember a couple of months ago, I basically bricked my machine.
I didn’t brick it. I reset everything from zero.
Yeah, I didn’t have to use a different browser when I downloaded Fusion.
But by then I already had a profile in their system too, so I logged in and then downloaded it.
Andy
And it could, it could be.
Yeah. And it did make us create a profile forum to start with. So we did have that but it was just kind of weird. I don’t like problems like that. If you’re developing a website, you really should be trying the major browsers up there is only like four or five that you really need to test for to cover like
Frank
That’s true.
Andy
80% of the market but I don’t think people are doing that. And back in the day it used to be that I remember having a browser. I don’t remember what it was called but it used the
Firefox at the time Internet Explorer. I think Chrome was a Netscape. Yes, they all had an object that you could incorporate into your own programs and things. And so somebody had built a browser for making websites that you can view it in the one program using all three different
engines. And so I know there’s got to be stuff out there like that that people use widely right I mean.
Frank
Firefox does do that, but you have to be using the dev version of it instead of the normal one.
And it’s only like maybe 3% of websites anymore because they’re all competing with each other, right?
It doesn’t matter if it’s Microsoft or Chrome or Firefox or anything, they’re all competing with each other.
So, they actually put a lot of effort into, you’re not going to have an issue with my browser.
The edge cases get frustrating, but then kind of in hindsight, it’s like, I usually don’t have a problem with this.
I don’t mind using Chrome.
I do, backing up a little bit, think it’s a little interesting that you went from Firefox to Edge.
Andy
Yep. Well, because I didn’t have Chrome installed. Like you, I had recently redid my entire computer and I just didn’t have Chrome installed yet for anything and since Firefox is always my go to those were the two installed browsers I had in the moment.
Frank
And you can’t disable Edge without having issues with the rest of your machine.
Andy
Yeah, no kidding.
Frank
And that I will say, in my mind, it’s worth the 5 or 10 minutes to download Chrome.
Andy
And that’s all it took and that’s just what I did in that moment. I just hadn’t had a reason to do it yet. And that was just the first reason I had to do it.
Actually, that is partially a lie. I was working on my son’s computer at the time and he didn’t have anything installed and but it’s the same excuse because I put Firefox on his right off the back because that’s what I’m used to downloading.
You know, the only use to edge on a brand new install is to download a different browser so.
Frank
Right.
Andy
And so I just grabbed that so he didn’t have that either so same excuse but but yeah no we got it in.
I did sit down and talk with them I told him this is going to be a complicated step but you like seeing what I can do in solid works and the solid works license is is kind of expensive to shift around.
So unless you know maybe when you’re a teenager if you still want to use something like that we can get your own copy but you know it’s like 80 bucks a year.
Frank
By then, he’ll have his own job and he’ll contribute to the license too.
Andy
And yeah yeah or something like that but for now Fusion 360 will be beautiful it works great and but it’s going to be a pretty big step.
You know so I told me really gonna have to sit down and do some tutorials before you’re ever going to figure this out this isn’t like 3D paint or 3D builder that you can play with it and figure it out and you’re going to have to do something so we’ll see how that goes.
However.
Frank
Well, it’s like any other big software, honestly, you can get 90% of it in a week or so, and then you’ll spend hours researching the other 10% for the rest of your life.
Andy
And he did get Da Vinci down or he got to that 10% mark with Da Vinci.
And so he’s making his own videos and things like that because he he’s just like that old home videos cartoon but.
But he’s always doing stuff like that and we we put it on our Plex server for him he’s got his own channel for all that kind of stuff but it is nice not having to do any of the video editing for him now.
He’s got that shared folder on my laptop here and whenever he finishes a video he just copies it over to it and then lets me know hey I got another one done for to put on Plex so it works out pretty good.
Andy
But he we got a deal when it comes to 3D printing his stuff I told him anything under 25 grams.
You can print one of those per day for free, especially if you’ve designed it yourself.
And occasionally I’m okay with one or two a week if they come off the Internet is is done models and he’s been running with that and he’ll sit down and adjust the sizes and infill and stuff like that to get it to to the slice under that 25 grams.
Or he has to pay for the plastic use me for the plastic used and Cura being wonderful telling you the price of the plastic right there it makes it really easy to do and stuff and and it’s not about the price of the plastic it’s to stop him from abusing the privilege so.
But he decided he wanted to make a large Lego minifig on the printer large like two feet tall large.
And he wanted to pay for it and so he he found a model.
I was trying to get him to design his own but he wanted to use a model that someone else built because it was well done and would actually like and have moving joints and stuff like that.
So, so he found a model and we sliced it all up, and he got it down to about $15 for his model, and we’ve been printing that off for this week here.
And I’ve got one of the pieces here it’s kind of funny it’s just the head of the Lego model can kind of give you an idea about how big that sucker will be.
And this is this is his project that he’s doing and it’s not one that he designed, but it’s one that he’s paying for and he sliced.
And I’m starting and running the print jobs because he’s got like 15 separate print jobs for this to come off and so I’ve been restarting the print jobs for him regularly but…
Frank
How does that qualify as a mini thing?
Andy
that’s what it’s not very many anymore that’s for sure.
Frank
Yeah, it does look good.
It’ll be fun.
Andy
Very cool. I mean, they come out kind of nice. It’s fun.
Andy
This is the one he’s doing is the space man so he’s got the tanks on his back in the helmet and stuff so that helmet’s going to be a nightmare for in for supports like the head here you can see very minimal support material not that bad, but the helmet.
So it’s like 20% support material just to get it to print. It’s going to be awful.
Frank
And that’s where the printing from the outside in, I’m sure.
Andy
Yeah, yeah, but that’s, I think that’s all that I’ve done for my projects this week.
Frank
Sounds fun.
Andy
Yeah, it’s been a good time and quite enjoying running off with the the SLA printer I’m getting a little bit better at not making as big of messes and
Frank
That’s always good.
Andy
Kevin a chemistry question.
My wife does make up and stuff like that a lot. And a while back, he got some 99% isopropyl alcohol, a gallon of it. She doesn’t like using a gallon of it she likes just buying the smaller bottles instead.
She gave me this gallon of it. Now me being cheap for the SLA printer, I was buying denatured alcohol and using that instead, because it’s like 25-26 bucks for you know a big gallon of denatured alcohol.
And that’s for the purposes of, you know, printing here, is it will it cause any problems to mix them together and use them at the live together.
Kevin
I don’t think so
Like it really ought to be fine because a lot of the time like you’ll they when they denature alcohol
They kind of that’s kind of in my opinion saying that it’s denatured is
Not an accurate use of the word denature because
Andy
Yeah, they added stuff to it.
Kevin
Right denature means that you are making it
Into a state where it is not active where it won’t do the thing you want it to do
But what they’re doing to denature the ethanol is they add stuff to make it so it it is toxic a lot of the time they will add methanol to it with
With so like I’ve worked in the lab with
95% as denatured ethanol that had 5% methanol in it the stuff that I got
I got a gallon of 99.5% ethyl alcohol for
Washing my resin prints and it was denatured with
0.5% turk butyl alcohol
So it’s they’re just mixing various kinds of alcohols in there to say well
Andy
Okay.
Kevin
You don’t want to drink it now because yeah, you’ll get drunk, but you’ll also die
Chris
Yay.
Andy
Okay.
Kevin
Or go blind or whatever you’ll have some kind of horrible side effect to getting drunk there
The funny thing is I got that 99.5% ethyl alcohol on Amazon and it had a disclaimer on there saying this is for industrial use only not to be sold to general customers
Chris
Okay.
Andy
Was it was it a good price?
Frank
As they sell it to a general customer.
Kevin
Right I think it was like $19
Andy
Oh, that’s even cheaper than the denatured alcohol I got here, which is clean strip a fuel. And if I remember right it was methanol that this has been denatured with. I don’t know what percentage.
Kevin
Yeah, the the the labeling has to have the percentages on it
Andy
Okay, now looking it up now just off the back. It looks like it’s like 30 or 40 bucks for a gallon of ethanol.
Kevin
Okay, yeah, so now this exact same jug would be $45
But I have only purchased the one jug
For laboratory or school chemistry lab use only haha well, I guess I justify it by saying that this is my printing lab
Andy
Yeah, there you go.
Kevin
I mean because I’ve I’ve got the I’ve got the beakers I’ve got the graduated cylinders
Andy
Yeah, when you told me to get some beakers for this to make it easier it definitely feels like I’m doing science now whenever I get anything out to clean it all up.
Frank
Now, all you need to do is learn calculus.
Kevin
Well, I mean you really are you really are doing science and and resin 3d printing is doing science more so than the FDM printing because with the resin printing you’re you are causing a chemical change
When you cure the resin with the FDM it’s only you’re only melting the plastic temporarily and then it re hardens in in its new shape
Frank
Semantics, I would argue that it’s all science.
Kevin
Yeah, it’s still science. It’s all science
Science rules
Andy
I have one other question that I saw someone else using and so I grabbed one to, and that is a squirt bottle to help clean up of alcohol, do you use anything like that.
Kevin
No, like what do they use the squirt bottle for
Frank
Well, spray it down and hit it with a detail brush, I’m assuming, right?
Andy
No, from what I saw the one guy using it was to like help rinse off the parts instead of wiping them down. So, like, before I put the parts into the wash bin.
I’m just holding them over my pile of rags from cleaning out the vat, and then just spraying alcohol on it letting it drip down into the, you know, into the rags, kind of spraying off some of the resin that was on the part before putting it in.
Because things like this like I ain’t getting a rag inside of my turbine. So being able just, you know, spray some alcohol in it let it drip out and things was seem to be useful.
That might be why I’m going through more alcohol than I would expect my that is already missing about a cup of alcohol over the seven or eight prints I’ve done so far. So, I am using it up seems a little bit but
Frank
You could even use the old alcohol for the detail wash, though.
And I said a detail brush, a toothbrush to get into the little crevices.
And…
Andy
Yeah, I was thinking about like that earlier when I was when I was trying to clean up the supports just getting it off of the supports a little bit, because I wanted to keep this chunk of supports. In fact, this is this is probably 75% of the supports that were holding that up.
That was not a lot. After seeing how many supports you use on yours, I’m thinking I am way underperforming here. But, but
Chris
Happens to the best of us.
Andy
yeah, no, thanks.
But yeah, that’s me.
Kevin
Well to be fair when I started out I also tried to use as few supports as possible and I was struggling to get successful prints and so then I was like you know what I’m just gonna I’m just gonna use a whole bunch of supports on everything and it has been so much better
Andy
Really. Okay, well I will switch my mentality on that. But I am first going to try to go the opposite direction and try to go zero supports and printing the flat, because that works so well with stuff like this. So…
Kevin
It can happen if you’ve got the right kind of model
Andy
Yeah, like I.
Frank
Oh, there we go. Sorry. You had more. You can what?
Frank
This. Have you worked on anything this week?
Andy
No, you’re fine.
No, I was just rambling. I think that’s all I got.
Frank
Chris!
Have you worked on anything this week?
Chris
So a coworker had asked for one of those little signs you put on your dishwaser.
It says clean, and then you turn it around and it says dirty.
So i found a nice little model on thingiverse and printed it up.
and it had just little boogers, just, all over.
Chris
Thank you you.
Thank you very much.
I pulled the nozzle out and put a new nozzle in that I got with my last set of plastic and
now my printer is saying that something’s up with my heat block and it won’t heat up the
heat block now. So I’ve got to dive into that.
way bad.
so I ended up printing like 3 or 4 more playing with different settings on my printer.
to see if I could get it to look better.
Now it just… No matter what I did.
different plastic.
Nothing changed it.
So. Anyway. I ended up just getting a deburring…
a couple, a few deburring tools and just cleaning them up that way instead.
So. Um. Got a few old hard drive magnets. Glued it to the back of them.
So i’m going to be giving two or three of these away.
Yeah. that’s what I did this week.
And I looked into changing my nozzle.
because I’m pretty sure this is the one thing I have not done.
right?
and I pulled the nozzle out and I put a new nozzle in that I got with my last set of plastic.
and now my printer is saying there’s someting wrong with my heatblock and it won’t heat up the heatblock now.
Andy
Oh, no.
Chris
So. I’ve got to dive into that.
Andy
Is it still reading the temperature of your heat block? Okay, when it said idle.
Chris
No, that’s the thing is just saying it’s not reading it is what it’s saying.
Andy
Okay, okay. Well, I mean, it could have been either no resistance on your heater core or no return from, you know, the, the thermocoupler thermal resistor so
Chris
Yeah, well I just got an error on my little screen that says heat ID equals minus 15 or
something like that.
Andy
Okay.
Okay. Yeah, the wires on if you got one that uses the heat resistors that wires are so fine.
Frank
Sounds like the connections.
The thermistor and the, the sounds like the same issue I was having a couple of months ago in the end when I disassembled and the wires fell off. It’s like, Oh, that explains my heat issue.
Andy
I’ve got some extra thermal resistors if it turns out you need one I can drop one off if yours is dead.
Chris
oh okay yeah well I’m gonna I’m gonna be digging into that either later tonight or tomorrow.
Anyway yeah that’s all I did is I printed a few of those up my co-worker was happy I
printed one in purple for my dishwasher and yeah it was kind of neat using the the dual filament
on those because when you got them flipped over to say clean they’re purple but then
when you flip them around to read dirty they’re green so yeah
Frank
Yeah, I saw that that that is cool.
Andy
Yeah, that was a neat effect.
Frank
So that’s your projects for the week.
Chris
yep yeah that’s all I did for the week I printed I started printing one of those
headphone supports and I only got through one before I before I jumped into these and now
my heat block’s funny so I can’t I can’t continue printing the headphone mounts for this tower
until I fix that.
Frank
Yeah, that sucks. I’ll keep us posted. Maybe my experience will give you a lower tolerance for testing the other stuff. So you don’t spend three months trying to figure it out.
Chris
Yeah well you know push comes to shove I’ll just you know buy buy a new buy a new heat block or
Frank
3d printer. Why would you buy a new 3d printer be?
No.
Chris
whatever. Well if I was to buy a new 3d printer I would sell this one first so I you know could
get a bigger bed. I’ve got the I’ve got the two yeah I’ve got the two 220 millimeter square bed at
the moment so could do with something a little bit bigger. Yeah.
Frank
That sounds about right.
Frank
Good deal. Kevin, have you done anything this week?
Kevin
I have so I mentioned last week that I was in the midst of printing up that articulated dragon to give to a friend for his birthday
And I liked it so much that I printed one up for myself and I took that to work and a co-worker saw it and she liked it so much that she asked if I would print one for her so I did and then
Yesterday just said well now that you’ve printed up three of those dragons can you get back to printing up my shelves and she didn’t like the idea of me gluing the two brown ends to the gray middle she’s like you I really want you to try to get this the brown to work so I
I changed the nozzle back to the point six millimeter and I made up a benchy with the increased flow rate and the decreased carriage speed and the benchy itself looked fine but there’s a lot of stringing on there.
But then, and so we talked about temperature towers and stuff but I had already started the center shelf, because it was taking a while to get information about temperature towers.
But then last night, when the shelf was nearly complete. We had a hiccup in our power at our house.
Frank
Oh, no.
Kevin
So I rushed upstairs to resume the print job and I’ve had success with that in the past. It didn’t work this time.
Andy
Oh, no.
Frank
It’s weird that everything cools down much quicker than you expect.
Kevin
right, and well and then when I said, because it said power out resume print job, and I said yes, and like I said I’ve done this before, and had success with it.
But this time is like okay well I’m going to heat up the bed meanwhile the nozzle still cooling and like what.
Then it’s like okay now I’m heating up the nozzle and now I’m going to do stuff to re re center and find where I am like okay you just didn’t text yourself.
You stupid thing but I, I had faith and I was like I’m not going to tell you to stop but I came up this morning and saw that yeah it’s it did not work.
So, and then another thing I did was that loot studios had said for my participation in the beta test of relics untold, and for taking a survey they would give me a free bundle.
They eventually said you know what never mind we’re not going to do a free bundle. We’re going to give you 100 free loyalty coins but they I had already found the bundle that I wanted and that was the Z day survivors or something like that.
Let me check for the exact bundle name I’ve got it right here Z outbreak survivors.
And so I was like you know what it’s it’s only $30 for me because I’m a subscriber to get this bundle.
And I’ve got my son who’s doing the zombicide chronicles game and this would just be perfect for that so I bought it and then I wanted part of what I wanted in this bundle though is this zombie hand cell phone holder.
So, I bought it and I downloaded all the files and I was like I want to print this in that gray green that I’ve mixed up before.
So I mixed up the green and into the resin, and then, then I opened the file in my in Chitubox and the hand is way way way way too big for my little resin printer
so I’m going to have to do that on the FDM,
because that’s one that I feel like I probably shouldn’t scale down to force to fit on the print bed, because then it won’t hold my phone anymore.
And, but I am like well I’ve got all this green resin so I printed up the pile of zombies.
Andy
Okay, cool.
Frank
Right.
With the forest of supports.
Kevin
And you can’t see on the camera how green it is it looks pretty gray on camera.
But it turned out really a lot more green than I was planning on. Like this is, this is almost the color of those green army men.
Frank
Yeah, just a couple of, just a little bit lighter than the GI-Joes.
Kevin
Yeah. And the reason it got to that extreme level of green is because, as I was mixing it up, it just looked gray.
I was like I can kind of see a little bit of green in this but I, I want it to be more green than it is and so I put more cyan and more yellow in and mixed it up and a couple drops of red and mixed it up and it was still looking pretty gray ish.
But as I said to myself I, I don’t want to put more pigment into this. So this will be fine and then I printed it up and I was like oh wow that’s that’s actually really green.
So.
Frank
Now you have GI-Joe zombies and them being a little, a little gray by comparison makes them look more like zombies compared to the regular GI-Joes anyway.
Andy
and at least you didn’t waste the, the color adding into it did find something to use it for after all.
Kevin
Yeah. And now I’ve still got a whole bunch but I’ve still got more, more zombie things that I can print from that bundle so I’m going to be doing that this week it’s going to be fun.
In preparation hopefully Kyle will be able to have his.
Zombicide Chronicles game on Friday he was, he had the day off of school yesterday so he was excited saying maybe my friends can come over in like the morning because they all had the day off school and well his friends were not able to come over at all because their
parents knowing that they had a day off of school made plans.
Frank
What? parents don’t do that.
Kevin
Yeah, so I’m hoping that next week he’ll be able to have his game and then I’ll have a whole bunch of stuff printed up for it.
So it’ll be fun.
Frank
Yeah, indeed.
Chris
nice to see your wife being a little shellfish for your printer time huh
Kevin
Yeah, well, I mean this is something she asked me to do a while ago and I really.
Chris
it’s been about six months you should get around to it
Frank
I mean, sounds right to me.
Chris
oh so
Andy
What, what about you Frank you do anything this week.
Frank
Uh, nothing big.
Um, my mother-in-law gave me, I don’t even know what kind of metal it is.
Like, in the back of my mind, I’ve kind of decided it’s nickel, but it’s a, a, a bolo.
I don’t know how to describe it. My, like her, I think it was her grandfather used to use it to hold his tie together for church.
And with my beard so long, she was like, Oh, Frank would love this and he can put it in his beard because he likes to put ornaments on his beard and stuff like that.
So she gave it to me and it’s just a strip of this metal that has been rounded.
And it’s in my bathroom. I should have brought it out.
Anyway, so it’s not very well rounded.
And what I did was I designed and printed off for lack of a better word a drift.
Like a, like the old blacksmith drifts when you’re drifting a whole.
And I designed it with two millimeters diameter difference over 150 millimeters in length.
And I just used my dead stop rubber mallet to round it off a little better.
I did print it solid because I’m going to be, you know, I was hitting it with a mallet.
And it’s just one of those stupid little tools that I probably will never use for anything else, but came in handy for that.
Andy
That’s like the, that’s one of those things where it’s great to have a 3D printer.
Frank
Yeah, indeed.
Frank
Otherwise, I’ve just been like working through this software actually thought it would be fun to do a little demo.
So I’m set up for a little background whisper will process the audio.
And then I have it configured to give it to me in JSON file format.
And for anybody who is not techie, it’s just a file format specifically for data transfer.
So I have an output and in JSON, and then, you know, because we’re doing this and we’re recording different tracks for every person, I can have it process each of those tracks independently and catch all of the things that are said by everybody.
And, but then I have to remerge the transcripts.
And that’s the software I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks now.
This particular software is really rudimentary.
So forgive me for some of this stuff, but it’s really easy.
Go in and find where did my pop up go.
There it is.
I’m only going to do two.
And it stopped.
Why did it stop invalid argument value of minus one is not a valid or index print.
Well, that’s stupid.
It worked the last time I did this.
Andy
Well, it’s figuring how much you’re working. It’s bound to have a bug here or there. Don’t feel bad about it.
Frank
Yeah, but it, it worked the last time I did this.
So the bug developed without me changing it.
Andy
Oh, that same file.
Yeah, no.
Frank
No, I did change something this morning.
I have to go figure out what I screwed up.
Well, welcome to the tech world.
I was ready to do a demo and the software was not ready to be demoed.
Even partially finished.
So I’m, because we started earlier to have more time to actually do that and get a good demo for you next week.
Andy
No problem at all. Yeah, look forward to seeing it.
Kevin
Kind of reminds me though of when Bill Gates was at some convention and he was wanted to demonstrate the plug and play capabilities of Windows 98, so he plugged in a new extension into the USB port and got a blue screen of death.
Andy
I remember that.
Frank
I can’t remember exactly what it was, but you’re right.
And then all of the windows texts are going.
We’re broadcasting alive.
We can’t have that.
Welcome to the tech world.
And even Microsoft is not immune like they’ve gotten better.
But even Microsoft is not immune to that kind of mistake.
Well, that’s everything I’ve got.
My software is not ready to demo.
Andy
Good to.
Sorry about that a little bit of a bummer, but I’m sure it’ll be up and going again next week.
Frank
It is, it is what it is.
Now that I’ve cut Andy off and everybody else has gone through.
I guess we can just wrap this up and go for the end.
Andy
Sounds good.
Frank
Well, we’d like to thank everyone listening to the very end.
Chris
The very holy crud end.
Andy
Been there.
Frank
If you like what you hear, please give us all the stars and subscribe.
We are available through a wide variety of podcast vendors and so we’re easy to share.
If you have feedback, you can find us in our Facebook group, amateur 3d pod.
You can email us at Franklin, Kevin, Andy or Chris at amateur 3d pod.com.
Or you can email us together at panelists at amateur 3d pod.com.
Kevin Buckner wrote the music for this episode.
Open ai’s whisper completed the heavy lifting for the transcripts, which you can find linked in the description.
Our panelists are me, Franklin Christensen and my friends, Kevin Buckner, Chris Weber and Andy Cottam.
And until next time, we’re going offline.
Kevin
Keep your peptide.
Andy
Always use hairspray.
Chris
Just print it, just print it, just print it.