Frank:
Thank you for joining us.
This is episode 20 of Amateur 3D Podcast, the 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 Codham, Kevin Buckner and Chris Weber.
That’s episode 20, guys.
Kevin:
Wow.
Andy:
Getting up there.
We’re actually doing something!
Frank:
Considering there was always that chance that we wouldn’t even last this far.
Andy:
Yeah.
Kevin:
Right?
Andy:
It’s working out pretty good.
Frank:
I agree.
Andy, have you worked on any projects this week?
Andy:
You know, I actually did.
After we finished recording last week here, I sat down.
Me and Chris stayed online and we’re just kind of {Andy had a potty mouth} a little bit.
I put together a strap adjuster for a mask that I’m going to be wearing to an event the wife’s hauling me down to. I printed it out at TPU, so I wouldn’t have to worry about it breaking and it worked out really good.
Chris pointed out something that was very unique.
He mentioned that the offset middle pin in those adjusters make them grab better than the ones that are always centered. If you look at some of the straps, some of the better quality ones, you’ll find that they’re off-centered.
I saw the same thing, so I tried making an off-centered one. I’ve already made another strap adjuster. This one was no different.
Even it was the same size, I just had to rebuild it because I’m moving away from solid works and into freecad, so I didn’t have my old drawing for it, so I redrew it. It definitely works better with an offset middle pin on the adjuster. That was kind of a fun little thing.
Moving to freecad has been kind of fun. It’s different, but still kind of the same. I’m noticing different things that it struggles with and other things it does a lot better with. It’s been kind of a fun little experience.
I’ve got a couple of projects coming up.
This last week here, I printed me a new phone case.
We were talking about printing outside your printer’s dimensions and things like that.
I printed me a new phone case, and it’s got more problems than the original one does.
I made a lot more errors because I had to redraw the whole thing.
Again, my original one was in solid work, so I redrew the whole thing in freecad.
I just made some dumb errors and I didn’t test it, didn’t check it.
It turns out to be too short, which raises the problem of how I printed the first one when the first one was like four millimeters longer, and I didn’t have to change any of the settings to make my printer print outside its normal ways.
This time, I had to adjust that and it’s shorter. I got some weirdness going on there. I wound up using five layers of TPU at 0.2 millimeters for the living hinge, and I discovered that is too much, way too much.
Frank:
It doesn’t like to bend.
Andy:
Yeah, it doesn’t like to bend.
I’m going to go back down to the three because the original one was three layers, but only the middle layer was running lengthwise that really worked well as the hinge.
The next one, I’m going to put the top and bottom layer running lengthwise to act as the hinge, and then the first one started to tear at the living hinge.
I think at the very edges of the hinge for maybe three millimeters, I’ll bump it up to five layers thick through there to give it a little bit more, so it won’t likely tear right there, but instead of the whole thing being five, it will just be those one little sections there.
Frank:
I do find myself wondering if, because I swear you talked about rotating it, I guess 45 degrees. The layer lines go across the hinge both ways instead of just one going the length of the hinge.
Andy:
Oh, God, we did talk about that, and I didn’t experiment with that.
Frank:
Now, I can see the problem with that being that you won’t be able to print corner to corner on your printer. You’d have to print the length or width of it.
Andy:
No, Cura does have an option to change the direction of your infill, which is where most of that, yeah, so you can just set a degrees. I could just tell it, because I still got to print the phone case 45 degrees, because it’s like 355 millimeters long right now, and my bed’s only a 300 by 300, so I already got to tilt it 45 degrees, but then I can go and change the infill pattern to also print that at 45 degrees.
That way I can get that effect, but I completely forgot about that.
That’s a brilliant idea.
Frank:
Then all of the layers are contributing to the support instead of bending along some of the layers.
Andy:
Yeah, yeah, no kidding.
That’ll work good, and then I can go back down to the three layers, which seem to work really well.
I’m going to do that, but it’s a project I’m kind of putting off a little bit because that first print was so involved with trying to get my printer to print outside of its range and stuff like that, and so I want to give it a little bit of time before going back to that again.
While I was checking it out though, I was concerned about the heater.
We talked about heat soaking the bed a little bit because I would be printing on the bed where the heater is not on the bed underneath, and I want to be getting my thermal camera out and watching the bed heat up.
I’m sure other people have, they probably all use a very similar heater structure because it’s just cheap to do, but I tell you what, that bed gets hot very evenly.
Now, I’ve got a tempered glass bed. It’s just a, I think it’s a quarter inch, yeah, I think it’s a quarter inch tempered glass bed, and then directly underneath that the heater is adhered to the bottom of the bed.
That’s all my bed is, it’s very simple, and it heats up very evenly across the entire length of the bed with about maybe three or four degrees difference as it’s coming up to temperature.
It stops at the temperature and it stays there for a while and the bed continues, the glass continues to heat up very evenly, and the heat even goes out past the sides of the heater underneath.
So, I was thinking it would be even in more towards the center of the heater where you get the correct temperatures, but I was kind of surprised to see that it was a little bit, it was a couple millimeters outside where the physical heater stopped, where you really get the drop in temperature, but so for those who are concerned about that, at least in my experience, if it’s similar to the Tevo Tornado’s 110 volt bed heater, heats very, very evenly.
I was very impressed with that, but let’s see, what else did I do?
Oh, I’ve got a project coming up this next week.
I’ve got canister filters for my fish tank, and I went very cheap when I bought these. They’re only like $40 canisters, and everybody complains about the pumps on them underperforming, and they do.
Frank:
If I’m going to tease Chris for talking about something to episodes apart, I’m going to talk to you about it too, Andy, you talked about the subject a couple of weeks ago.
Andy:
Printing a new impeller?
Frank:
Not a new impeller.
I thought you were going to go into your filters.
Andy:
Oh, nope.
I already did that a while back.
I printed a baffle in between the filters, and when I pulled that apart, it worked out really good.
It’s working good.
Frank:
That’s where I thought this was going.
Forget I said anything.
Continue.
Andy:
No, you’re fine.
Anyway, the little cavity that the impeller is in on this pump, the impeller is like half the size of the cavity, and that looks like a standard across the board with all of these kind of pumps, but it makes me wonder why is it only half the size of that cavity?
This week here, I’m going to go in. I’m going to try to print a little adapter that I can clip onto the top of it to make it almost a full size, and see how that changes the flow of the pump.
These are one of those neat pumps where the entire motor itself is just a coil around a tube, essentially, and then inside that tube where you got the water is where you got the magnetic impeller, and it’s just the magnetic field from the coil pulsating that causes the impeller to actually spin.
Putting an extra load on the impeller, I don’t think will change anything. It will just mean it will either not work or it will work kind of thing, but this will be something to kind of experiment with.
I’m kind of excited to print something like that.
If it wasn’t for fish stuff, this is a situation where I really wish I had Kevin’s printer, because it’s small. I’m only going to be working at about maybe four or five millimeters tall, and maybe 12 millimeters around, maybe closer to 15 millimeters around.
The impeller is only that size, so I’ll be printing a pretty small device here. It’d be nice to have the kind of resolution that Kevin could pull off or stuff like that, but we’ll have to see what happens with the FDM printer.
Yeah, I think that’s all I got going on, or all that, and I know it was kind of a bit, so I apologize for ranting.
[10 Minutes]
Frank:
You suddenly got me wondering, Andy, have you ever heard of a hero’s engine?
Andy:
No, that one doesn’t sound familiar at all.
Frank:
So it’s a steam engine that spins rather than your traditional engine.
Chris:
Is that the one with the two L-shaped tubes on top of the sides?
Frank:
So it’s a ball, and the expanded air comes out at an angle and creates that moment of inertia, and Adam Savage did a video on one that he spent, I think he said he tried to get it to work for a week, and he was coming up on the deadline for a sponsor, and he’s like, okay, well, let’s just do our best, and even if it doesn’t work, there will be something on film that they can probably use, right?
So he goes in there, and while he’s doing the last check to see if it’ll work with dry ice. it works! it starts spinning, and all I could think of while you were talking about this impeller is, I wonder how it would work to have that on a heroes engine.
Andy:
That’d be kind of fun.
Chris:
I think the fish would have issues with the extreme heat or the extreme cold involved.
Frank:
Probably.
It’d have to be operated from outside of the tank, maybe.
If you were going to do it with liquid nitrogen, it would take a preventively expensive amount.
Andy:
Yeah, no kidding.
Frank:
It’s to operate regularly, so there’s that too.
Andy:
Yeah.
Well, I’d look into just getting another pump for these altogether, but they don’t really make inline pumps, aquarium pumps, with that kind of impeller setup, or at least not ones as neatly designed as this.
I mean, they pretty much just took a tube that the water would pass through, put a coil around it, and then put an impeller on the inside.
It’s just like a super, super simple setup, and I love that. I think that’s really cool, but other ones are bigger, they’re bulkier, or they have to go in the tank because I don’t want my pump in the tank itself, and a bunch of other reasons behind it.
I’ll have to see if I can make the pump that’s on here work a little bit better.
I’m sure there’s got to be a reason why the impeller is half the size, because I see it on all of those kind of pumps.
There all seem to be undersized impellers for the cavity that they reside in. I want to experiment to find out why, because I’m sure it probably won’t work better, but I’m curious why it doesn’t work better.
It would be kind of a fun little project.
Frank:
I would wager that there is…
Chris:
It’s a fluid dynamics to it, yeah.
Frank:
… Probably some kind of explanation on the internets.
Andy:
Yeah.
When you see a lot of other blower style pumps like that, they do fill the entire… The prop itself does go into the entire cavity of the spinning part.
It’s weird that these ones stop prematurely, but the size of the cavity that they’re inside.
Chris:
What are they moving?
Andy:
I’m not talking about the circumference, I’m talking about the height of the unit itself.
Chris:
Are they using different… Are they moving different materials?
Is one for air and one for water?
Andy:
Yeah, it’s very much so, yeah, that is very true.
Chris:
That’s probably it.
Andy:
Yeah.
Anyway, I want to play with it and see.
Frank:
Fair.
Andy:
That’ll be a fun print to do.
And especially since it’s such a tiny little print, I get to kind of think more in layer line thickness for the print, because there will be no infill, you know.
I print with a .6 nozzle, so my fins should probably 1.2 millimeters, I think, would be best.
So I’m going to make them 1.2 millimeters, so I get a full swipe down and a full swipe back up from the head, you know.
Little things like that, I get to kind of think of how the printer’s going to print it to make it optimized for such a small, little, tiny print.
Frank:
I almost wonder if you want to reduce it by a tenth of a millimeter, just so that there’s that ever-least little bit of overlap, so they hold together.
Andy:
Yeah.
Chris:
We’re going to let you experiment with the bigger nozzle before we jump into it, right, Frank?
Frank:
Me experience with a bigger nozzle?
Chris:
No. Andy.
We’re going to let Andy experience it.
Andy:
Let me see how the bigger nozzle does before we jump into that ship, right?
Frank:
I just add an extra internal wall if I want it thicker.
I’m not going to buy a bigger nozzle right away, but it’s really a lack of need to play with it right now.
If that changes, you know, I’ll shift gears.
Andy:
Yeah.
Well, I think it’s fine.
Bigger nozzle, I haven’t, I’ve only experienced positive things.
When I first changed it over, I was not running the Arachne engine for Cura, and I was looking in detail, but as soon as I upgraded Cura to version five, I think it was that uses the Arachne engine and was slicing stuff with that, I was no longer using, losing the detail.
I had got the detail back with the.6 nozzle.
So other than lower print times and being able to do much stronger overhangs without supports has been very useful with the larger nozzle, but you can kind of compensate for that by lowering your, or increasing your resolution, lowering your layer height.
That way you’re not printing off of the part for your shell layer, you know?
If you have the layer height, then it’s going to take two layers to get to that, that, you know, drop off.
So it works a little bit better with lower layer height.
So you know, there’s not, there’s things you can do to get around going with the bigger nozzle.
So there’s nothing wrong with going with either, but I think I’m going to stick with the.6, it’s been doing me good.
Frank:
Okay. Good deal.
Chris, you work on anything this week?
Chris:
Nope.
Frank:
Nope?
Chris
No Death.
No taxes.
Actually, it’s no death, only taxes.
And yes.
Yeah. So I was doing taxes this week and, uh, yep, dealing with that, but hey…
Frank:
That’s enough of a headache all on its own.
Chris:
Yeah. Well, I finished up last night and I’m ready to file. So that’s nice.
So out of the way.
Frank:
I still need to do ours. So…
Chris:
Oh, I did find something out about my printer though this week because I was goofing around with my old, you know, hooking my old laptop up in my office, you know, because I was working on getting that updated to Windows 11.
Frank:
What’s that?
Chris:
So yeah, that, um, well, so occasionally, um, my, like if I’ve left my printer on for, you know, I don’t know, three, four weeks, um, the, my computer won’t, it won’t see it on the Comport anymore.
So reset my computer and reset Cura, but until I reset my printer, my printer will not, uh, talk back to the computer saying, Oh, my Comport is here.
So anyway, I discovered that…
Frank:
There’s a reason techies look at you first thing and say, did you turn it off and on again?
Chris:
Right.
And so, um, yeah, apparently my, my Marlin board, you know, the little touch screen is still, it gets power both from the 120 volt in and through the, uh, board regulator and, and it also can get five volt functionality from the USB port for, for my, for my PC. Kind of cool.
Yeah, it’s USB type B.
So it’s the squarey one that has the two notches off the top two corners.
Frank:
Yeah.
Andy:
The printer USB port.
Frank:
and that goes into your printer? That’s the one that goes in?
Chris:
Yep.
That’s the Comport.
Frank:
Mine is micro. USB micro so I can use any, basically any, uh, cable on it.
Chris:
That’s cool.
Frank:
Most of what I’ve got is the USB C cables.
So I do still need an adapter, but that’s a personal choice.
Chris:
Well, see, and mine also still has like, like a micro card reader so I can put a micro card in there or it has the USB type A for a thumb drive.
And if I want to plug an Android into it, all I got to do is just use my USB type A to USB C adapter and I can, you know, output Android to it too. So it’s not like I lose any functionality.
Andy:
That is kind of cool.
Can I ask, is there a reason why you have it plugged into your computer to talk to Cura?
What do you do with your printer while using Cura?
Chris:
Well, Cura monitors my printer while I’m printing.
Andy:
I did not know it does that.
I use Simplify 3D for that particular function.
I didn’t know Cura could do that.
That’s cool.
Does it have like a console or something for checking stuff?
Chris:
No, I just selected my printer with Cura.
Cura loads my printer and then you’ve got the top three tabs where you load your build plate and then you’ve got your, oh my gosh, the editing one where you can see, you can see the way it’s going to print.
And then you’ve got…
Andy:
Oh, monitor!
Chris:
Monitor.
Andy:
Oh, I have no idea! Wow!
I’m checking that out right now.
So what usually, so I’m not plugged into my printer, so I just got a big gray screen on this.
What do you see on that when you have your printer hooked up?
Chris:
So it’ll show me the bed temperature, the extruder temperature, the estimated plastic usage and the estimated printing time and the current printing time.
[20 Minutes]
Andy:
I’m going to have to look into that.
That’s pretty cool.
If something like that works well, I’m going to have to see if there’s a Wi-Fi device out there that I can plug in to USB that I could…
I’m sure there is something you can move a USB device, turn the USB into a Wi-Fi device.
Chris:
Yeah, I think if you have…
If you have Octoprint, you can do something like that and then Cura should still monitor it.
Yeah, there’s a couple boards out there that do do that kind of stuff natively.
I don’t want to go and switch out my board for that, but it’d be neat to see.
I’m going to have to look into that to see if I can do USB…
Frank:
I have seen… It’s basically a wireless switch that uses the Octoprint to track multiple machines, which is where the real power of that software is.
For a 3D printer farm, a lot of people will have that going on and being able to just print directly to a machine when it’s done rather than the…
This is actually the first time I’ve ever used the term, because I only just learned it from you, Andy, but other than the sneaker net.
The sneaker net?
Chris:
Like Converse or what?
Frank:
Yeah, literally, you unplug from your computer and you walk over and plug into the other thing, the sneaker net.
Andy:
That’s how I print with mine.
Frank
That’s how I do mine.
That’s why I put my printer right next to my computer, so I don’t have to walk all the way across the room to use it.
Chris:
Then I use a remote desktop software if I’m not near my computer.
I can just wake it up from sleep and then print something to my printer via a remote computer.
Andy:
That does work.
Frank:
I mean…
Chris:
I can be at work and pull up my phone and if I know I’ve got plastic loaded, I can just remote in and say, okay, I’ll print this thing for me.
Andy:
Can you print with your computer hooked up to the printer?
Can Cura force your printer to print something without taking the file to a USB drive and popping that into your printer?
Chris:
Yeah, literally.
You’d load the STL file into Cura and run it right to the printer.
Andy:
Okay.
I didn’t know if you’d do that either.
Chris:
You slice it and run it right to the printer and you don’t have to save it as a G-code or anything.
It just runs right to the printer.
Andy:
That’s cool. I’m going to look into a Wi-Fi USB.
The closest I ever got to this was using a WiFi SD card, which you could put into the printer.
Once you set it up for your Wi-Fi Internet, you can put it into the printer and then I can go upstairs to my laptop that I usually use everything on and I can have it as a drive on that machine, the USB card that’s downstairs.
I can copy files to it or remove files from it, but I still got to go downstairs and start the printer.
That is really cool, especially for the monitoring.
I don’t think I’m too comfortable doing a long print and relying on that communication to stay stable the entire time for the print.
That’s great. That’s great.
I’m going to have to look into that for monitoring.
That’s cool.
Chris:
Yeah.
As long as I can rely on my computer to be running the whole time it’s printing, which I can.
I can do long prints.
I mean, that’s how I’ve done all my printing, so those 12 and 14 hour prints I’ve been doing, just like that.
That’s the advantage to having the printer plugged into my office computer is because I can remote in and just print up anything I want from anywhere.
Andy:
That’s cool.
That makes actually a lot of sense because I remember you always described yourself as having a printer laptop, a printer machine.
That’s why I always ask you, do you use Octoprint or something like that on it to run your printer?
That sounds like you actually kind of wore this whole thing. You were using Cura’s version of that.
That’s neat.
Chris:
Sort of.
I use TeamViewer and then just remote into the desktop and use it as if you were sitting there, but you’re not.
Yeah.
Andy:
Yeah, but you’re still on that machine that’s feeding the printer, so you’re just using your G-code interpreter on your printer only and letting Cura do all the heavy lifting.
That’s neat.
That is neat.
Chris:
Yep.
Andy:
I did not know I could do that.
I’m learning a bunch of things today.
Chris:
I think the simplest way to just print was just to have it on my office machine that I already have there anyway.
Andy:
Yeah, and all that does make total sense.
It does. That’s neat.
Frank:
I do have this spare computer and this whole time I’ve been thinking I could use that rather than having it connected to my media server.
I have a dedicated, just cheap laptop.
This thing cost me 50 bucks and use it as the intermediary to save the STLs to it whenever they get created, saved, and then remote desktop into it and have it slice and print just there.
Chris:
Yep.
Andy:
Yeah.
Chris:
My only drawback was that when the new version of Cura came out, like I said, it was my older office computer running Windows 7, and so I had to upgrade it to Windows 10 to get the newer Cura to load in.
I ended up just popping my old laptop and just switching it out because it’s running Windows 10.
It runs the new Cura. I’m liking it.
Frank:
Yeah.
Andy:
That’s neat.
Frank:
Most of what I’ve seen because I’ve done a little bit of research but not a ton is folks will take like an Arduino or something and basically load a mobile vision, version, of Windows on it and basically treat it the same way we’re talking about here.
Chris:
Yeah.
I wonder if I can do that with a Raspberry Pi.
Andy:
Yeah.
If we’re still doing that with Pis, I don’t think Arduino would be powerful enough.
Chris:
But yeah, I’ve got a Raspberry Pi.
It’s got its own Pi operating system. I wonder if that would work in the same aspect.
Andy:
I think that’s one of the things you can use to run Octoprint on actually Raspberry Pi with Octoprint.
Frank:
Yeah.
Honestly, you don’t need Windows necessarily to connect to your printer. If you can load a mobile version of Linux on to the thing and it worked just as well and it tends to be a little bit lighter depending on your use for it.
Chris:
Yeah.
Well, I have mine physically plugged into my router right now because I’m using it as an ad hole.
But yeah, I don’t see why I couldn’t experiment with although my setup works great as it is.
Frank:
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Chris:
Yep, because I just barely finished fixing it.
Andy:
It does look like Octoprint does run on Raspberry Pi. It looks like that’s what it’s actually designed for just looking at this right off the bat.
It’s not something I’m too familiar with, but yeah.
Chris:
It’s just kind of a shame.
When I first bought my Raspberry Pi, I bought it like, well, I bought it like two years before I had a printer and ended up spending 20 bucks to get this nice little aluminum and steel case for the Raspberry Pi, and now everybody’s just printing them.
Have you seen the mini-Nintendo’s? Those things are kind of…
Andy:
Yeah, those are.
Frank:
Actually, when you were talking about making modifications to your NES, I think you was what you were talking about, Chris.
Chris:
Yep.
Frank:
A friend had one of the mini-Nintendo’s. Those things are cute. They’re only four inches by five, I guess, basically.
Take the little regular original Nintendo controllers with the USB cable to plug them in, an SD card in the back with every Nintendo game ever written because they’re that small, and then you got what you need right there.
Chris:
I mean, heck, I did that with my Nintendo DS.
You can buy what’s called an R4 or an Edge, and you put all the games on this little SD card, and then you put the loader program on and put it in the Nintendo DS, and now your little DS plays all of the old Nintendo games, all the old SNES games, and you can find a lot of the actual DS games, too, to play on it also.
It’s kind of cool.
Frank:
And now Switch is redoing a bunch of those games.
So if you want a higher resolution and a little bit better graphics for all those old games, you get to pay for the new version or find somebody who has already made a mobile copy of it.
Andy:
Yeah.
That’s a neat option for them to be able to do.
I mean, it definitely gives them, you know, to be able to use all that IP that they have. It’s actually to be able to re-release it.
Chris:
To be fair, actually, the wife bought me the Legend of Mana, the old SNES series, for our Switch for me for Christmas.
So yeah, some of them are definitely a good investment.
Frank:
At some point, I imagine they’re doing the same thing that Disney does, where when that IP is reaching the end of its copyright period, they release a new version so that they continue to control it.
Andy:
Yeah.
Frank:
As much as possible, anyway.
Chris:
I wonder if a new version is like they made it a multi-pack so that they can still hold all of the copyrights or if that counts or not.
[30 Minutes]
Frank:
I do feel that’s kind of what they’ve been doing.
They took all the N64 games and made them available.
If you join the Nintendo program, whatever subscription program it is, and I say all.
They’re building the library still.
They only just in the last couple of weeks released the 007 and they keep adding to it.
Chris:
So I wonder how much better people are going to do playing 007 with the new style controllers versus the N64 style controllers.
Frank:
So it’s actually literally a straight port from the old version to the new version. And I didn’t realize, I didn’t think of it at the time when I was playing 007. But the joysticks don’t match with modern joystick operation necessarily.
You’re forced to either move forward or turn with the same joystick or strafe and look down or up with the other joystick.
And modern, if you think about it with most of your modern games, one joystick is all movement and the other joystick is all look.
And so it takes some forced perspective to change back to something that you did 20 years ago and didn’t realize that there was that much evolution in operation since then.
Chris:
Yeah, although it kind of reminds me of when I played Halo for, I still play Halo, but it was the only game I played for like a good few years there.
And then I got Skyrim.
Well, in Halo, you can switch the, which, which thumbstick, you know, moves you around and which one you look around with, but in Skyrim, you can’t do that. And so they were backwards from what I had used.
So it took me like, I don’t know, well over a week of one to two hours every day, playing with, playing with Skyrim to get myself adjusted back to, okay, that my left hand moves, moves me around in my right hand, makes me look around.
Frank:
I will say a lot of games are very configurable like Halo is one of the big ones that I’ve played where you have three or four dozen different configurations so that you can play how you like the controls. But when you play a game that doesn’t give you the options, they tend to all be the same way.
Chris:
Yeah.
Well, so, you know, at least they’ve got that universality going for you for them, which is kind of nice.
Frank:
Yeah.
So Kevin, have you worked on anything this week?
Kevin:
Yes, I have.
In fact, I, excuse me, I printed up a couple of yarn bowls.
The first one I did, the supports failed about two thirds of the way through, maybe three fourths of the way through, because as I checked on it to see how it was progressing, I noticed I could actually see the LCD screen lighting up underneath the resin, which is a clear indicator with opaque gray resin that you don’t have enough in there.
So I added more resin and then the bowl itself worked though.
And so it made me say, well, I wonder if I need to have any supports inside the bowl because I couldn’t just print the bowl with the bottom against the build plate, otherwise it wouldn’t fit.
It would be way too small.
And I did have to scale it down significantly anyway in order to get it to fit on the build plate and then print it on its side.
But it’s still, it’s still big enough for my needs.
When I do a knitting project, I don’t, I don’t ball up the yarn until the skein is getting so empty that it starts tangling itself because of it’s just collapsing in on itself anyway.
Chris:
I imagine those would still be fun for tatting too.
Kevin:
I haven’t ever done any tatting.
But anyway, anyway, so I think the first one made me say, do I really even need to have these internal supports to make sure the far end of the bowl prints properly?
And so I tried another one without the internal supports and it worked just fine.
So I now have two of those yarn bowls and the one I didn’t have to do any work to get the inside of the bowl to be perfectly smooth.
The other one I had to do quite a bit of work with, with my rotary tool to wear down all the burrs and make it smooth.
Frank:
So you needed the tool more with the supports?
Kevin:
Yeah.
Frank:
Am I hearing that right?
Kevin:
Yeah.
Frank:
I guess that kind of makes sense because they would have to be connected.
Kevin:
Yeah.
Frank:
That’s more work.
Andy:
Another good reason to try to design around not leaving supports for things.
Kevin:
Well, and see this bowl was initially designed not to need supports, except for on the parts that have the holes that the yarn can go through, but that’s also assuming that you’re using an FDM printer.
Frank:
Or at the very least that you’ve got a print space big enough that you can print it.
Kevin:
But since I had to print it like that, then supports became more necessary. Or so I thought. The slicer said that the top of that are the far end of the bowl would need supports, but it turned out to not be the truth.
Frank:
So in other words, SLA slicers lie.
Kevin:
Sometimes.
Chris:
You just follow programs.
Frank:
If you want a bigger bowl, Kevin, I don’t mind printing you off one.
Kevin:
Right.
Frank:
If you decide you want one.
Kevin:
I’ll, I’ll see, I’ll see if I get to that point.
Frank:
Okay.
Kevin:
But I mean, these are like, I haven’t measured the diameter of the narrow part of this yet, but I estimate that it’s four inches.
Frank:
Yeah.
And mine are close to 200 millimeters across.
Kevin:
Which is significantly larger. Yeah.
Chris:
That’s like a little less than eight inches, right?
Something like that.
Frank:
It’s weird.
I don’t even think an inches half the time. Maybe not so weird. Let’s see what my…
Andy:
Was that something that, if you wanted one bigger, that you could have cut it up into pieces and then printed them individually and glued it back together as one solid piece?
Kevin:
Yeah.
Frank:
Yeah. That’s right about eight inches US.
Andy:
That’s not to go back to my whole phone case thing, but I think I might wind up doing something similar to that where I’ve got a three millimeter thick surface for the cover of my phone.
I’m thinking about maybe taking maybe an inch and a half to two inches after the light, the living hinge, to be a flap that I can glue down to the other side.
That way I don’t have to try to, try to print, you know, two or 360, 370 millimeter long project on the 300 by 300 bed, you know, or thinking even of printing it vertically, you know, with the case sitting on its side, but print it so that the hinges slightly folded to be able to get more space out of it too.
Chris:
Printed already half folded.
That’s brilliant.
So I think I had suggested maybe it wasn’t one of our previous episodes.
When you were talking about the phone case, I was saying, you know, it could be easier and possible to just print it in two pieces and then just glue the, you know, glue one and an insert to the other or something.
Andy:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s definitely an option.
It was one I was trying to avoid though.
I like the one piece thing and to be able to gloat that I printed something that’s that big off of my, you know, tiny bed was kind of fun too, but yeah…
Chris:
I think it’s more just about knowing when to use which type, I guess.
Frank:
Either way is fine, Andy, we we’re doing this because we like to flex every once in a while. So…
Kevin:
Right?
Andy:
Well, here’s the kind of nice part about the phone case of having the outside of the case being against the bed, because then you get that nice absolutely flat surface for the case, you know?
Frank:
Yeah.
Kevin:
Yeah.
Andy:
But having it printed sideways with layer lines that make up the face of the case… I don’t know if that would be a bad thing.
That might be just fine.
Frank:
That might be cool.
But at least you could show it to people and go, and by the way, I planted it sideways.
You see these lines that I know my mother-in-law, my mother-in-law is just fascinated by when I said, yeah, it’s not such a great design for these bells.
You see these layer lines, you know?
I mean, it’s not the fault of the design, it’s the printer, specifically me.
But it’s still kind of cool, and she enjoys them.
Andy:
Yeah.
Chris:
Yeah, and in the future, you know, if the layer lines end up being kind of a thing, like I was saying, you can actually smooth them out quite a bit by using a heat gun.
You can use a heat gun and then just smooth it down a little bit, if it’s a problem.
Frank:
And it wasn’t a problem for me before, not really.
I did start caring a little bit more, I guess, and that’s why I went from the.24 thick layer lines to .20, and just adding that extra, going from four layers, a millimeter to five layers a millimeter, changed the resolution more than enough for anything I care to do, so…
[40 Minutes]
Chris:
And that’s crazy.
So, I mean, because I’ve just been using .16 since I first got the dang thing, so.
Andy:
I’ve been a .2 guy.
Frank:
I have printed at .12 for a few projects, just out of curiosity, but I haven’t stuck with it by any means, mostly because it takes three times as long to run a print off at .12.
Andy:
Yeah.
Frank:
Yeah, the.20 seems like a happy medium between time and resolution for me so…
Chris:
Yeah. And it also depends.
Are you printing something to be functional and not necessarily seen versus are you printing something to be seen and maybe you want to kick up the resolution and let it take a little more time?
Frank:
Well, and even my statues that I printed, they were at .24.
My desk parts were all at .24, and it’s all still perfectly fine. I just a little bit, you know, sometimes the layer lines can bother you just that little, you know, not going to the point twos.
Like I said, that middle ground for me, that works.
Andy:
You said like 2.0 that that’s what you went to
Frank:
.2 millimeters.
Andy:
Are you really printing at.2 millimeters?
Frank:
Yeah.
Chris:
Yeah.
Are you really printing at.16?
Frank:
You say 2.0, Andy, that’s 2 millimeters thick.
Andy:
You got a point. I’m the broken one here.
Yeah..2. That’s what I meant the whole time.
Frank:
Well, you started with .2 and then you started to go on with 2.0. I was worried for you for just a moment.
Kevin:
And I printed.05.
Frank:
Freaking SLA.
Chris:
Got a flex, man.
Frank:
I could print.05, there’s just no value in it for me.
Andy:
Yeah.
We could do that too, Kevin.
It just takes days, print small things.
Frank:
Actually, now that I think about it though, if I was working on a statue where I didn’t want to see any layer lines, I’ll have to consider going to .05 instead of the, what Cura says is the high quality at .12, just to see what changes.
It’ll also give me an opportunity to see if my hot end will cook my plastic while it’s waiting to be extruded.
Andy:
Yeah.
That’s definitely like a PLA only kind of print doing that because you definitely don’t want anything stringy when you’re going over the print over and over and over again that many times.
Chris:
Honey.
Andy:
It’s definitely nothing that would bake like PETG.
Frank:
Wife walks in and goes, what is burning?
Andy:
I was about to get it.
Chris:
You’re a…
Frank
I’ve been in here all day. I don’t smell anything.
Chris
On fire. What’s going on?
Oh, I’m just cooking dinner.
Frank:
Yeah. My hobby printer probably should not be pushed to that finer resolution.
Andy:
It’s fun to kind of play with and see what it can do sometimes.
I would only do it with PLA though if I was you.
Frank:
Yeah.
Andy:
And if you’re okay with cleaning your clog because you definitely pushed it too hard.
Frank:
Yeah.
Kevin:
I mean, I could also go even lower, but I don’t see the point in going less than.05.
Frank:
Flex. Flex. Flex.
Kevin:
I think it said that I could go as low as .02.
Frank:
All right. Well, Kevin.
Kevin:
Yeah.
Frank:
I can flex too.
Chris:
Oh, hey, look at that beach ball.
Frank:
It’s over there, or maybe it’s over there, it’s about this big.
And of course, that’s a bunch of activity that our listeners may have context for.
But more than anything, they’re just going, come on guys, get to the thing.
Kevin:
Yeah.
Yeah.
Frank:
Get to the monkey.
Kevin:
Doing visual things makes great listening.
Frank:
I’m sure.
Chris:
Yeah.
Get to the mood of the program here.
Frank:
Yeah. Well, my projects this last week were hooplooms to go with my yarn bowls for my nephew, and I’m going to show them how to use those.
Andy:
That’s an easy thing to do on the build.
Kevin:
Yeah.
Frank:
I put the ballad of Franky D in there, which was a three day journey of unclogging my hot end
Chris
Again.
Frank
And it was because I got a couple of prints of those looms that were spongy for the last half.
Andy:
Yeah.
Frank:
And that was, I guess, an epic that I won’t get into this episode because we’re running longer than usual just on the, “What have you done?”
Kevin:
Yeah. We’re almost an hour in and we haven’t even gotten to the topic yet.
FranK
Well, that’s nothing new, but the whole going this long on the projects thing is kinda new.
So our topic this week is unexpected solutions.
Andy:
So this is a topic that I was, oh, sorry.
Chris:
I was like, I know that we’ve got a lot less of these, but we do still have a few. So maybe it’s good that it took us a little longer to get here.
Andy:
Yeah. Yeah. Perhaps.
I really loved this topic idea, but when I sat down and tried to think what, what I could share about it, I wasn’t, I was kind of coming dry on this one.
What are some of the things you came across there, Chris?
Chris:
Well, there was the snowflake thing, right?
You would already talked about where I glued that card.
That was a quick, unexpected solution and it worked.
Andy:
Yeah.
It worked out well too.
Andy:
There was another thing.
So, like last May, I was printing one of the in-laws, some Celtic coasters, you know, for her birthday.
So I did the color changing plastic for the coasters themselves, but I didn’t, I picked a different file to do for the coaster holders.
So I mean, so they matched and they’d looked really cool, but the coaster holder itself ended up being, I did not look at the size and it did not contemplate resizing it before I started printing it.
This is where I learned, hey, you need to look at your relative sizes when you first start putting them on your, you know, something like that.
So learning lesson for me.
And so the first one printed bigger than I needed by a good inch, inch and a half in diameter.
Andy:
Okay.
Chris:
Or not diameter in, yeah, in diameter.
I was thinking circumference for a quick second, but yes, diameter.
So, but I printed it out of white plastic and it had this nice little opening in the front and I just put it upstairs and saw that the wife has a lot of little penguin miniatures.
So put it up there, we threw all the penguin miniatures in it and now it’s part of our winter decorations.
Andy:
That’s cool.
Kevin:
Nice.
Chris:
Crazy.
Frank:
So it wasn’t a complete loss.
Chris:
Nope. Not complete loss, but it was unexpected and actually it’s, it’s a nice little container for Oliver little penguin miniatures too, so that, that actually ended up being handy.
Frank:
Oh, good deal.
Chris:
Let’s see what else have I, I, I done, there was, oh yeah, so I was printing a, and shortly before this, I think it was like one of the first things I printed when I was figuring out infill and all that was I printed a pencil holder, right, and I’m like, oh, okay.
It’s one of those hex hexagonal, you know, both vertical and then it’s got all the holes that are also hexagonal through the sides, right?
But I printed it at like, I think it was somewhere between 80 to 90% infill.
So it took forever and it printed really solid, used up a lot of plastic and it was heavy and I’m going, I don’t really want to use this for pencils and things now because it’s like, it’s kind of heavy. It’s more like a paperweight, you know..
Frank:
a couple of episodes ago, we were talking about printing like hammers and that sort of thing.
That would work.
Chris:
Yeah.
If I glued it to something, yeah, you know, put it, glued it to a handle, it would have been a pretty good mallet
Frank:
Anymore, they use epoxy to connect the handle to a sledgehammer and that sort of thing.
It’s the same idea.
Chris:
But, you know, and I had been looking for a nice little way to store all the tools that I got with my printer and the ones that I was adding to my little Euler repertoire set and this ended up working just perfect because it’s so solid.
It’ll hold the dykes really well and it’ll hold the knife and the, you know, and the scrapers and, you know, really, really, really well and keeps everything all upright because it’s so darn heavy.
So yeah, unexpectedly printed myself a nice tool holder for all my stuff.
Andy:
Yeah.
That is a good one.
Frank:
This is a little off topic, but I find myself wondering about what it would take to print a dead stop mallet.
Andy:
Oh, dead stops just are filled with sand for the most part, aren’t they?
Chris
Yeah.
So you just pause the, you pause the print, you know, midway.
Frank:
Oh, while, it’s printing one side, dump all the BBs or sand or whatever inside of the void.
Chris:
Yep.
Andy:
Yeah.
Chris:
Or, even better, steel bearings.
Andy:
Yeah.
Frank:
Well, I almost wonder if the smaller, more granular inside would be more effective because it’s not about weight at that point, right? It’s about absorbing all of the impact.
[50 Minutes]
Andy:
Yeah.
All of the rebound.
Frank:
The bounce impact.
Yeah.
Chris:
I didn’t say they had to be big bearings.
Frank:
Fair.
Andy:
Really tiny ones.
Frank:
Well, I just think sand at that point anyway.
Andy:
Yeah.
Oh, that would work.
Chris:
Sands easier to get your hands on.
Frank:
Yeah. Especially in Utah.
Andy:
Yeah.
Frank:
Go out in the backyard and get some sand.
Kevin:
Yep.
Andy:
Well, the unexpected solutions that I came across was when I burned out the main board on my printer and needed to purchase a new one, it didn’t have Merlin on it. And so I had to locate the operating system that allowed me to upgrade Merlin.
So I was running a newer version.
And then right there, and then I had all this source code for Merlin so I could do all the little tweaking that I wanted to do.
So it was kind of unexpected gains for burning out my main board there that turned out to be almost worth having to spend the money to buy a new main board for the printer just to discover those options were there, you know.
That was kind of one.
Switching over to FreeCAD, I’ve noticed doing a chamfer and fillets a little bit more, you got to be a little bit more tender with it. You can’t, sometimes it’s hard to get it to do what you want it to do.
And out of frustration the other day of trying to cut a fillet on an already filleted surface next to a chamfered surface and it was complicated.
I don’t blame the program for saying “wha?”, but I wound up taking and doing a cut manually for the fillet that I wanted to be done. And it was just a straight fillet for, it’s just straight through for this one.
But you know, I wound up just using the pocket feature with the extrude cut feature in FreeCAD to cut the fillet itself.
And it just like worked flawlessly.
And that the unexpected solution here is, I could make a fillet of any kind of shape I wanted to at this point, like I could do anything with this.
And if I do got to go around a corner and stuff like this, which I haven’t played with yet, but should be easy.
And that’s using like guide curves
Frank:
Or a loft or a loft.
So well, yeah, and if your edge is a little more complex, you just set the edges, the path, and it will follow the path.
Andy:
So yeah, yeah, so I’m excited to play around with that.
It already is quite the solution for straight fillet and chamfers that might be more complicated. But there might be even more of a solution for for doing guide curves like that and make them however you want them.
It’s nice to have a little extra control.
But you know, those are those the only two that I could come up with right off the bat.
Unexpected solutions.
It’s sounded like such a great topic at the time.
I still really like it, but I still have a lot of examples of it.
Frank:
Well, and I would accept that there’s an aspect of it that’s like, “okay, I found the solution. I can do the print that I’ve been fighting with for the last week. And now that that’s done, I can move on to the next project,” and we don’t think about it anymore.
Andy:
Yeah, no kidding. No kidding.
Kevin:
Yeah, the only thing I could think of that I’ve done is when I was to use me, I was trying to design in FreeCAD a little score marker token for the ticket to write expansion I printed for my wife.
And when it when it put when I measured the token that came with the game in diameter, I went into FreeCAD and where it said radius, my brain said diameter. And so that’s the number I put in. And so I ended up printing and I’ve talked about this before that that disk that was twice as big around or across as I needed it to be.
But then I started learning about changing FEP and everything and found and learned that people would use a Gatorade cap as a spacer to make sure that their their FEP had just a little bit of slack on it when they were changing it. And that ended up being the perfect size to be one of those spacers. And it’s not I don’t have to justify having this random Gatorade cap that just looks like a piece of garbage hanging around.
Instead, I’ve got something that looks like it was made for a specific purpose, which it was, it’s just not the specific purpose that I am now using it for.
Chris:
So that sounds kind of like when we were buying toilet paper at 14 years old.
Frank:
I’m afraid to ask.
Chris:
Tell him the story, Kevin.
Kevin:
Well, so we were going to go toilet paper at friends house and we went to we were 14. So we didn’t have a car or anything.
So we walked to the grocery store or the convenience store or wherever and bought a bunch of toilet paper and the cashier as she was ringing us up said, “Why do I get the feeling you’re not going to use this toilet paper for its intended purpose?”
And we said, “I don’t know, we’re not.|”
Andy:
That’s wonderful.
Kevin:
Yeah.
Chris:
And then we said, “and we intend to use it right on some of.
Frank:
So young enough to not realize that if you give them plausible deniability, they will use it?
Andy:
How about you, Frank, you have any unexpected solutions?
Frank:
I have a solution that nobody seems to like, which is cranking the temperature on my printer.
Andy:
Yeah.
Chris:
Well, that’s not entirely true because I tried it and it worked great for me, but it’s not it’s it’s it’s useful only in certain applications, so you need to take it as you take it as you need it.
Frank:
Well, and I honestly kind of got tired of fighting temperature because it was either just a little too high or just a little too low and I couldn’t zero it in.
And then I heard in another podcast that they don’t care about temperature at all.
They go to events and people ask them about temperature and they’re like, “I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you”,” you know, and it just got me to thinking.
Number one, I live at 4000 feet above sea level. The recommended temperature from 90% of the users online are not going to be fighting with this same issue anyway.
Kevin:
Right.
Chris:
Yeah.
Frank:
And if you ask anybody who cooks every almost every recipe, especially with baking, but almost every other recipe, the temperatures are wrong because we’re at the wrong altitude for it.
Kevin:
Right.
And so a lot of recipes will even say, cook it at this temperature for this duration. But if you’re above this elevation, cook it at this other temperature for this other dip duration.
Frank:
Exactly.
So because the heat differential is different here anyway, plus we’re arid. So there’s not the moisture in the air that a lot of other users online have to deal with.
Chris:
Which I think would be actually beneficial printing plastic. But yeah.
Frank
In many cases, at least our plastic doesn’t absorb as much moisture when it’s being stored.
Chris:
Yeah.
Because it’s hygroscopic.
Frank:
But yeah, going above the spec for the plastic from the producer actually had the desired effect where I don’t have to worry so much about where the temperature is while it’s printing.
So that one was unexpected for me.
Chris:
Yeah.
Frank:
Though it shouldn’t have been, I guess.
Chris:
I will go ahead and follow you on that one. Cause yeah, that was unexpected for me too.
Cause you said that it worked better for you. So I followed suit.
And yeah, going higher than the recommended temperature, I do that on all my plastic and it works great.
Frank:
Yeah.
Andy:
That has only brought me trouble.
And I’m sure you guys are right on your end that it is working better, but it’s always gotten me trouble. Always having clogging issues and things.
Frank:
You also print primarily with PETG though, right?
And it’s a little more touchy.
Andy:
And TPU.
Yep.
Yep.
Frank:
Those are a little more touchy.
And most of my work has been in PLA and it is much more, well, number one, it prints at a lower temperature than the PETG anyway.
Andy:
Yeah.
Frank:
And so it’s not as, it’s a little more forgiving with a higher temperature.
I did notice that like with the PETG, I try going higher and I didn’t realize this until actually fairly recently.
Unless you overwrite it, Marlin has a top temperature of 100 and no, 260 yeah.
So trying to go higher than that is not going to have any effect unless like I said, you overwrite it and that has to be done on the back end. You can’t do it with the dial.
So excuse me.
Andy:
And you run a, what’s it called a PE tube or whatever inside yours. You’re not all metal.
So, I mean, you could wind up melting that down too on the inside, running it hotter than the 260.
[60 Minutes]
Frank:
Which I’m sure has contributed to part of the problems that I had this week.
So I did have to figure a way to work with the plastic differently than I have with the PE or the PLA like enormously differently as far as temperature.
And that might qualify as an unexpected solution. But from the other end, turning the way I’m supposed to with it was unexpected.
Andy:
Yeah.
Frank:
Or the way I’m recommended to get it to work.
Andy:
Yeah.
Frank:
Because science is weird like that.
Chris:
Yeah.
I had another unexpected solution.
I just remembered, I remember I told you guys about that mysterious ticking noise I had, you know, November, I think.
Frank:
Yeah. Mousebones inside your machine. Yeah. Cockroach. That’s what it was.
Andy:
Cockroach legs.
Chris:
No. I think it was actually a stray piece of plastic or something, but I just use it. And I was expecting to have to tear the whole box apart and, you know, replace the internal fan because that’s what happens. And nope, it was nice.
And also the cooling fan on my hotend, actually, in the last two months, just randomly, like it’ll not kick in at the beginning of the print after it gets to like the third or fourth layer when it’s supposed to.
And I’ll hear kind of a, so you flick it with your finger, you know, right in the middle of the hub and it then works just fine.
So I’m thinking, what is going on with that?
Andy:
You guys know of any solutions for when they start to get gummy or when they start to break down like that?
Because I wound up buying a bunch of, yeah, a bunch of cheap Chinese fans so that I can just replace it any time that it starts doing that because yeah, it’s bad that the bearings start going out on them.
Chris:
Yeah.
Well, what you do is you put a little bit of white lithium, you know, like the spray can you get.
I’ve extended the life on loads of my fans simply by getting a little bit of white lithium in the in the bearings.
Andy:
Oh, that’s neat.
You do it right as you start or right as it starts to fell on you or is this something you do before it fails?
Chris:
Yeah.
This is the point where it just it doesn’t kick in when it’s supposed to and you give it a little bit of encouragement by flicking it and it works fine.
This is the point where you get the lithium grease on it and it’ll work fine like this for about another, at least when I did it with computer fans, the computer fans, they’d last about a year to two years after I’d graced it and then start acting up again.
So you grease it again, flick it around a little bit, let it run and you know the fan lasts.> I can say I’ve actually lost the motor, the motor before I’ve lost the bearings on the fans I’ve got.
Andy:
That’s kind of cool.
I’ll have to try that next time.
Frank:
So that strikes me as something that you could do is preventative maintenance too.
Like when you first get the fan and then it won’t wear out as fast in the first place and probably get more life out of it.
Chris:
That’s a good point.
Because that white lithium grease on the little spray can, you know, it’s specifically for you know, high movement, you know, low density oil applications.
Andy:
Yeah, that’s interesting.
Frank:
Maybe just buy the fans and pull off the plastic parts.
So you’ve just got the motor and redesigned the motor with the closed bearing.
Chris
Of course.
This is something that you can hook the spray tube to every cellophane and kind of like a zirt fitting.
Frank:
Yeah!
There you go.
Andy:
There you go.
There you go.
Frank:
Hmm.
Chris:
Oh, Frank’s gears are going.
Frank:
Oh, they’re always running.
You have no idea how many things I’ve thought of to modify my printer or to make something better somewhere else and five minutes later, I can’t even remember what the project was.
Chris:
Well, maybe that’s how you filter out what’s practical.
Maybe that’s how you filter out what’s practical. The stuff that really sticks is the stuff that you can actually get around to.
Frank:
I’d accept that.
One of those prioritize and execute situations where…
Chris:
I’ll call it natural selection.
Frank:
Okay. Yeah.
One of the ones who survived are the more resilient ideas, whether they’re good or not is irrelevant.
Andy:
The ones that stick to the memory a little bit better.
Chris:
Like a marshmallow gun.
Andy:
Yep.
Except that.
Frank:
I remember it was just after I got out of the military, coming to your place and you were playing with your marshmallow gun and putting holes in your vinyl fence.
Andy:
Yeah.
Frank:
With marshmallows.
Chris:
So, not necessarily the best ideas, but gosh, they stick out.
Frank:
We were doing it for an hour before we thought, hey, you know what, your roommate drives a BMW and it’s right in the line of these marshmallows, we should probably check on that car.
Andy:
No kidding. That was some good times.
I wound up painting the whole thing white and it’s been used at multiple weddings as a garter cannon.
Frank:
Well, there you go.
Chris:
Boom, baby.
Frank:
Kind of in hindsight. I wonder, I mean, you made it out of pretty durable fittings in the first place. So none of them will probably need to be replaced in the near future.
I wonder how many of those pieces could be replaced by 3D printed stuff though.
Andy:
Yeah.
I mean, a good part of it. I mean, it was built mostly out of PVC, a ball valve and an old fire extinguisher can.
And it’s air powered.
You just charge it up with an air compressor, it was breech loading. So it had a metal pin to hold the breech together. But other than the tank and the valve, I think you could probably print everything.
Although the, just the stress of moving it around and stuff, I’d be worried about breaking it.
Chris:
Yeah. Delaminating it and it wouldn’t hold the compression very well.
Andy:
Yeah.
Unfortunately, but still, it was a fun project, I’m looking forward to doing tubes like that when it comes to your project there, Chris, for fixing your canopy, making the new tube adapters for that.
I think that’s something we’re going to have to keep the lamination, your delamination in mind for when you make those adapters.
Chris:
But yeah, I’m going to try to follow suit with what Frank was saying where he put supports on it and, you know, prints it vertically at a 45 degree angle, because that might actually give me the best offset for where the tubes are being inserted to avoid delayering.
Andy:
Yeah. Yeah.
Chris:
I’m thinking.
Frank:
That feels right.
Yeah.
Chris:
So it’s, so the light, at a 45 degree angle to the force, if there’s a force of, yeah.
Frank:
Then it’s not, it’s not likely to break.
If it breaks across a line, it’ll have a bunch of stuff intermingled with it, and it won’t be a straight horizontal or vertical break, which feels like a stronger part.
Chris:
Yep. We’ll experiment.
I’m going to, you know, print one up, put it on a pole, and then start hitting it on things, see what happens.
Frank:
The near commonality between the non-planar printing where, instead of having the interlinking weave for the layers, but yeah, sorry, my brain just latched onto that one, probably means it’s about time to wrap this up.
Andy:
Yeah, we’re about the right time.
Chris:
It’s a wrap.
Kevin:
I’ll wrap you.
What?
Wrap up.
I just don’t even make any sense.
Chris:
Don’t wrap yourself, man.
Frank:
I don’t know.
Andy:
Let’s make like a tree and get out.
Frank:
All right, Biff.
Side note, the actor that played Biff has gotten so much crap! He’s actually very smart.
Andy:
He’s a, he’s a great guy for life.
Kevin:
He’s also nice.
Frank:
He’s a comedian, which means he’s very smart compared to a lot of people.
Kevin:
Right.
Chris:
Yeah.
Frank:
He gets so much crap for the things that his character does and he’s like, “you realize I’m an actor, right?”
Chris:
My typecast moved into my actual life.
Frank:
Yeah, he’s a very nice guy by all accounts. Just yeah, whatever.
Andy:
Yeah. I’ve seen a couple of his videos when he talks about it.
He seems like he’d be a great guy to go have a beer with.
Frank:
Yeah, I agree.
With him and Mike Rowe in one room and you’re just going to have a good time all night.
Andy:
Oh, I would love to have a sit down with Mike Rowe.
That would be a wonderful conversation.
Frank:
I agree.
Yeah.
Well, let’s do this.
Andy:
Keep on getting bigger.
Maybe we can have him on the podcast
Frank:
Or, you know, he might invite us to be on his podcast.
That would be It’s own…
Andy:
Yeah.
Frank:
Oddity.
Kevin:
Yeah.
Frank:
“So, uh, what do you guys do?”
“Oh, we’re just amateurs.”
“All the amateurs I know we’re billionaires, guys.”
“That’s not us.”
Yeah. We do this for the fun of it, not because we want to get paid.
[1 Hour 10 Minutes]
Kevin:
Right.
Andy:
Yeah. Yeah.
This doesn’t bring any money at all.
It’s an excuse to hang out and do something together.
Frank:
Right.
Which is why we spend 45 talk, 45 minutes talking about everything but the topic.
Andy:
Right. The topic gets us here. It’s the important part.
Kevin:
Right.
Frank:
True. > And we do eventually get around to it.
Chris:
We got to the topic. So, okay.
Andy:
Plus, if we ever, if we never get to the topic, we could just sit down and think about what we discussed the most about and call that the topic for the video.
Kevin:
Yeah.
Frank:
When you need to recover, why not?
Chris:
We can reuse it.
Frank:
That works.
Chris:
Not a problem.
Frank:
And we can come back to that.
Right.
Well, we’d like to thank everyone for listening to the very end because, you know, we chat and do things that are not conducive to ending a conversation.
If you would like to, or rather, 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.
Hint, hint.
Nudge, nudge.
Chris:
Wink, wink.
Frank:
There you go.
Kevin:
What do you mean, what do I mean?
Frank:
If you have feedback or if you have content requests, please let us know.
You can find us in our Facebook group, Amateur3DPod, or you can email us at panelists@amateur3dpod.com.
And if you must reach out individually, you can do that at Franklin, Kevin, Andy, or Chris @amateur3dpod.com.
The music in this episode was written by Kevin Buckner and our panelists are me, Franklin Christensen, and my friends, Kevin Buckner, Chris Weber, and Andy Cottam.
Until next time, we’re going offline.
Kevin:
See ya!
Chris:
Sign of far ya suckers!
Andy:
Oh Dear.
Post-production ending:
Until next time, we’re going offline.
Kevin:
See ya!
Chris:
Sign of far ya suckers!
Andy:
Oh Dear.Frank:
We didn’t talk about that at the beginning of this, and I wasn’t thinking about it until I was halfway through that outro.
Do you guys want to do your personal sign-offs?
Andy:
No, I think it’s great the way you do it.
And if there’s a little outburst like that, then so be it. That was awesome.
But however… I myself think the outro I think would become really long if each one of us tried to say something.
But if it’s an outburst like that, then it doesn’t really take time.
Frank:
And I think Andy was just surprised that it happened too.
Maybe next week he won’t be so surprised.
Andy:
I had to say something everybody else did.