024 – Fun Toys Games

Frank

Thank you for joining us.

This is episode 24 of Amateur 3D Podcast, a podcast by amateur printers for amateur printers, where we share our thoughts and experience.

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

And just so that Andy knows, I’m not going to lose my mind, but that’s mostly because I got whiskey on my desk with me.

Andy

Well, I’m glad to see that I’m still under the list of your friends, so that in its own makes me happy.

Frank

You may be far down on the list, but you’re there.

Andy

I’m pulling up the rear, making sure everybody’s in line.

Frank

I said somebody’s got to set the bar low.

Chris

Low bar just means the short people can get drinks too.

Andy

Oh, I love it.

Chris

So anyway, yeah, episode 24, that’s because of the holidays that makes it so we’ve been doing this for six months now, right, one episode away.

Frank

Yeah, close… I’ll have to actually do math…

Chris

52 weeks to a year.

So that means 20, well, that 26 is half a year.

Frank

It’s not a straight 52 though.

Let me do math.

This is April, January, okay, March, April, May, June.

Chris

Oh, I broke Frank.

I just love that we have something that we’ve gone back…

Frank

…eight months. So at the end of this month, it’ll be six months.

Andy

Wow.

Just to have something that brings us together near nearly every single week.

Frank

Because that…

Andy

…six months is impressive.

Frank

Yeah, yeah, we haven’t done that since we all lived in the same neighborhood.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

And even then, Kevin was an outlier, far away.

Chris

You know, the drive and work and stuff was hard to schedule around.

Andy

which is kind of a shame because if I think if Kevin did wind up living closer, our board games and stuff like that might have moved over into the more D&D kind of world and that that would have been fun.

Frank

Maybe I’ve always, it’s weird that I’ve always had a challenge when it comes to D&D type games.

Andy

Really?

Frank

I don’t know what it is.

Like I love the books, like the source material books that just all the DMs use.

And I like RPGs. Just for whatever reason, I struggle with the paper based people in front of people talking, you know, and I don’t even know for sure if it’s like a social awkwardness or anything like that, which nobody believes me when I say I’m socially awkward, but there’s that too.

Andy

You hide it well.

Kevin

A good portion of people who play tabletop role playing games are also socially awkward.

Frnk

So it shouldn’t be a problem then. With a capital S.

I hate that word though. So…

Andy

Should.

Frank

Yeah.

Kevin

Yeah.

Frank

Shold is a dirty word.

Andy

You should definitely hate it.

Frank

Now that you’re using it that way, I may just have to censor you, Andy.

Chris

Plausible deniability.

Kevin

Deniable plausibility?

Frank

That one makes more sense to me.

Andy

So have you guys printed anything this last week?

Kevin

Yes.

Chris

Cool.

Andy

That’s awesome.

All right.

Let’s move on.

Frank

Go ahead.

Kevin

Yeah.

So I, uh, you remember a few weeks ago I talked about that we finally started playing with miniatures and so my brother-in-law went on Hero Forge and made his character and emailed me the STL and his stepson, my nephew did.

So I printed those up and I’ve also started printing up some of the stuff that I’ve gotten off of Loot Studios and I keep on trying to print with the pre-supported things that I get from Loot Studios, but it never works and I just need to learn my lesson that I just need to get the unsupported files and have my own supports because they tend to work when I do that and they don’t work when I do the pre-supported.

Frank

Interesting how that works.

Kevin

Well, it’s that the pre-supported things have just a very tiny contact point for each of the supports on the model and so it just pulls the model right off of the supports when it lifts the build off of the FEP.

Frank

Okay.

Chris

Right.

Frank

The benefit, no pun intended, outweighs the, or not the benefit outweighs, but the downside outweighs the benefit in this case.

Kevin

Yeah.

Frank

Because I can see how having a small contact point would be nice just on the post subject.

Kevin

Yes. It would make the cleanup really easy, but if it pulls the model off of the supports before it finishes printing…

Frank

then there’s no post.

Kevin

There’s nothing to clean up.

Frank

Right. So it’s almost better, right?

Kevin

Yeah.

Chris

Yeah, but you don’t get what you wanted.

It’s like putting ingredients for a cake together and then leaving it in the fridge for a week until you decide to try to bake it or whatever.

You didn’t get your cake.

Frank

Or black-box programming. Like most AI is apparently, and I wasn’t aware of this.

Nobody knows how the AI works. They just know that it does.

Kevin

Right.

Frank

So, yeah, you put garbage in, you get garbage out, but you don’t know why.

Chris

We got a smart program making more programs that can’t be detrimental to us in the future, can it?

Andy

It’s not very effective at the moment.

Frank

Well, and it has to go through a learning phase, right?

Frank

It’s not the kind of AI that you would put in charge of, say, your house or a spaceship or something like that.

How far away are we from AI-operated spaceships? Anyway.

Frank

Probably closer than cars, actually.

Frank

Maybe.

But we’re using AIs that are very good at one thing or things that are related to the one thing they’re really good at, right?

So it’s a step on the way there.

We’re just not to the point of HAL yet.

Not that anybody really wants HAL.

Andy

I played around with neural nets, and the whole black box bit, I understand.

We know how it works.

We just don’t know enough to track through it how it works.

Frank

Yeah. Well, there’s no stack traces at work to follow that path.

Like a ZIP Recruiter, for instance, uses machine learning to validate applications and that sort of thing. And they’ve learned in recent years that it’s biased in some weird ways that were unexpected. And they’re trying to compensate for it, but they don’t want to make hard changes to the algorithm if they can help it. Just because it would throw things that… they wouldn’t be able to predict how their changes would impact the process.

And they don’t necessarily know how it comes to the conclusions it does. Just that they’re out of, what’s the word I’m looking for? They’re not socially balanced, they’re not entirely unbiased.

Andy

Yeah, and I think that is mostly to come by the training data set that they’re getting, or not even the training, if they recycle their data back through once they know the actual answers and things like that, any bias that’s in the data alone will be focused on.

In my own work, I get blue-stake tickets, and I pre-screen everything, but I get a lot of information from those blue-stake tickets. And as I do them manually, and I can say this one is clear, this one’s not clear, I can run all of that through the net and then tell it this is clear, or this is not clear. And whatever the prediction is, I can backwards propagate in the correct answer, training the net.

And in my line of work, most of the tickets are just people asking for their entire lot, which is never really going to be clear. And so that’s one that I’ve always just ruled out, because it is 90% of the data.

If I run that data through the net, any part of that data that comes back through is flagged as positive, is worthless to me. But that means that, so I’ve always taken it out before on the training data and everything that I’ve ever done with. But now, if I put any of that through, it’s easily flagged as positive. And it’s just, it’s the data that I chose to omit from the training material that now causes my whole system to be biased against those particular kind of tickets.

Frank

Okay, so…

Andy

And I’m sure stuff like that happens all the time when they’re training these kinds of nets.

Frank

Well, and there are other things where we can conclude why the AI made the decision it did. We just don’t know how to compensate for it.

Andy

Yeah, well…

Frank

For instance, there’s the instance where they were trying to use AI to identify photos that contain cancerous, or skin cancer and legions. And so they had a large database of known cancer photos and a large database of known healthy skin photos and ran them all through the training process. And it was concluded that there was a high probability that photos with a ruler in them had cancer.

Kevin

Yep.

Andy

That’s how they would work.

Frank

Just because they all had a picture of the ruler to identify the size of the cancer. And so it’s nice, but it can’t read our mind.

So we rule out the ruler when we’re looking at these photos going, okay, well, if we compare these photos with these photos, but the AI doesn’t know better.

And…

Kevin

Right.

Chris

All humans are cancerous.

Frank

Maybe during the robot apocalypse, I’ll just super glue a ruler to the side of my face and they’ll ignore me because I’m going to die anyway.

Andy

I love that.

Kevin

Another thing I learned about the zip recruiter type job screening AI, and this was from John Oliver thing where he talked about the same skin cancer ruler thing he mentioned.

Frank

That’s actually where I got this, by the way.

Kevin

But I really liked the part that he talked about that if your name was Jared and you played lacrosse in high school, you stood a good chance of being moved to the top of the list when looking for a job.

Frank

It’s like, huh, I may just have to update my resume.

Kevin

Change your name to Jared and say you played lacrosse in high school.

Frank

I don’t even have to change my name.

I just have to… I’ve thought for a while that to get past the robotic AI portion of the job search, I should take a bunch of high probability keywords and put them at the end of the resume and just make them white and hidden so that they don’t show up in anything.

But so that the machine can find them. And if I could put Jared and lacrosse in with those keywords, then that might help me get a job in the future.

Andy

That’s actually not a bad idea and… hell… If you’re going for any kind of programming job and they did find it, that would almost be a positive thing.

Frank

They might look at it and go, that was pretty clever.

We’ll give them an interview just because he outsmarted our algorithm.

Andy

No kidding, no kidding.

Frank

Assuming that the Jared who plays lacrosse is an actual point of reference instead of John Oliver just talking out his rear end like he can do.

Kevin

Right.

Andy

Yeah.

Well, how about you, Chris? You print anything?

Chris

No, not this week. This week I started the new job, things are going well, and I spent a bit of my free time cleaning up, finishing cleaning up my storage spaces and things that I’d got to while I was unemployed.

Andy

That’s good.

Chris

Yeah.

Andy

Well, you know, you are obligated for the podcast to print at least one item per week.

I mean, we talked about this last podcast, I believe.

Chris

Oh yeah?

Oh yeah?

Frank

Says just the guy who was just talking about not having printed anything this week.

Andy

I’ll make the rules, I don’t have to follow them.

Frank

Hey, my clash of clans thing, I designated myself as one of the leaders to be on probation because I broke a rule.

Andy

Okay.

Frank

But it’s a good way to get everybody else to follow the rules too, “the boss isn’t above this stuff.”

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

“I should get in the line.”

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

And the same thing goes here. Granted, you’re not the boss. So…

Chris

I was going to print something for the new job, but…

Frank

actually I think I was just talking about you were at the bottom of the list, Andy.

Sorry, Chris, I broke in on you a few times. Go ahead and continue.

Chris

No, that’s good.

So I was going to print something for the new job, but I decided to just ask one of the tool makers in the shop to just take this drawing that I’d pulled up and see if he’d make me something.

And he was like, oh yeah, I’ll do this today.

And so I didn’t even have to print it.

He had it made out of aluminum in the same amount of time it would have taken me to print it.

Frank

Nice.

Chris

Yeah.

Frank

Can you talk about the part?

Chris

I cannot talk about the part, but it’s just a little mount to sit the part on for the CMM.

Frank

Okay.

Chris

So it’s a very little thing. It’s like not even an inch tall and like three quarters of an inch wide at its widest. And it’s got like, you know, two holes and a slot in the side, the other direction. And so it is very difficult to clamp it down in any reasonable fashion.

So by getting this little mount made that sits on some three, two, one blocks, you can just make sure that it’s in the same place in the CMM all the time. And I’m not spending, you know, a minute using the CMM manually to locate the parts so the CMM can run the program.

Frank

Get it dialed in.

Chris

So I can just do it once and the CMM knows where it is all the time, no matter what, because I’ve got like, they had like a stack of 300 of these things that I have to run through the CMM.

Frank

Okay.

Chris

And so when I’m spending, you know, one minute apart, that’s like 300 minutes I can save just on, just on this batch of these. So…

Frank

Well, and, you know, that’s how you impress your employers too, right?

Chris

Yep.

Frank

I took this job that you guys have been doing for how long and I still improved it so I could get the job done quicker.

Come on engineers, show me what you got.

Chris

Yeah. Well, they’re a smaller company. So they’ve only got like a couple of engineers, they don’t have a lot. But they had a lot of these little things. And so I got started on them and I got through quite a few that day. So.

Frank

Good deal.

Chris

I didn’t get the new, the new part till toward the end of the day. So I’ll have a before and an after reference. So I’ll say, okay.

Frank

Just to see how well it does.

Chris

Yep. So I can say, okay, I went through, I got this many parts through without it. I got this many parts through with it. There’s something usable.

Frank

Yeah.

Good deal.

Chris

Yes.

Frank

Well, Andy, are you certain that you didn’t do anything with your printer this week?

Chris

He dried his socks.

Andy

I tried my socks.

I didn’t do that.

Yeah.

Frank

Oh, what was it your wife’s socks?

Andy

No, I didn’t even turn it on.

I think I turned the light on my printer.

So I wouldn’t have to turn the main light on in the laundry room. And that’s about as much use as it got this week.

I did.

I did have some thoughts though on, on a project, you know, I’ve been talking a lot about my phone case and the inability to print something that is, what is it, three hundred and seventy millimeters on a three hundred millimeter bed and falling short by like five millimeters.

So I’ve taken your guys’s thoughts on cutting it in half actually. I really like the glossy surface that has where the print touches the bed and would like that for the entire length of the phone case.

So I think I’m actually going to cut the phone case into three quarters and one quarter, which should give me a print that will fit on the bed for the three quarters of it. And then glue them together, the two pieces together. And right where it glues together, I’m going to do that on where the phone mounts.

That way I don’t have to worry about flexing or anything funky like that.

Frank

Okay.

Andy

And the original idea was, well, if I got to put print both pieces, you can’t print supports with TPU because they don’t break off. They have to be cut off and removed.

So supports are difficult.

Now, if you’re only supporting like a model or something, that may not be too big of a problem. But if I wanted to do like a tongue and groove kind of pocket or a tab A slot B kind of things to be able to glue these two pieces together, I would have to have supports on one of the faces where the slot would go.

And that just wouldn’t work.

And so I was originally talking to you guys thinking, well, maybe I’ll print it in three pieces, have the two main foam pieces, but have the pocket on the top that overlaps the cut between the two pieces, and then make like a third cover that would cover over the two pieces into that pocket, and then you can glue all three pieces together.

And then that led to another thought is it sucks to glue TPU. So I was thinking, you know, I wonder if I take some, uh, nichrome wire and zigzag it through the glue as I glue it. And then once I’m done, take some juice, take some power, run it through the nichrome wires, which will heat it up, melting both layers where it is making contact. And then some, not enough to melt through it, but enough to, to melt it right there. And that would give it a fairly permanent thing.

Chris

You’ll have a fire hydrant handy, right?

Andy

You know me.

Frank

Fire hydrant?

Fire extinguisher! You’ll have a fire exinguisher handy right?

Frank

I’m the one drinking whiskey, Chris. That’s your excuse.

Chris

I don’t know. I’m only on my first beer.

No.

Sorry.

Frank

That’s what we get for starting recording later in the day, I guess.

Andy

Yeah, that’s all good.

But one thing hit me earlier that is going to turn out to be a really neat solution that I did not know existed. Now, you guys know acetone melts ABS, right? And so you can use acetone to weld ABS pieces together and it is very permanent, right?

You don’t get a better glue than acetone between two ABS pieces because you’re making it one piece.

Frank

Right.

Anbdy

So I looked up, is there anything like that for TPU and I found it.

It’s called a tetrahydrofuran. I probably not pronouncing that right, THF. And looking into this stuff, it works almost as good as acetone does with ABS. It’s not quite as good, but you could even do smoothing and stuff with it.

Frank

Okay.

Andy

And according to the safety sheet, it’s about as bad as AB is acetone, but it’s more aromatic. So you need better circulation so that it doesn’t get in your lungs, otherwise it does something very similar to acetone. So not more dangerous than acetone is kind of what I’m getting at and making me a little bit more comfortable to be able to use it outside with gloves and things like that.

But I bought some of this stuff on Amazon. I’m going to give it a shot to see if I can do what kind of welding, solvent welding. That’s what it is. Do some solvent welding for TPU.

And if it does work, then Chris gave me a beautiful idea on how to do a pocket on the print where you would need supports. And what you could do is right before as you’re printing, put a pause right at the very last layer of the support before it starts printing over the top of the supports and lay down a piece of wax paper or something over the top of the supports so it doesn’t connect to it.

And you still have that elevated surface for it to print on, but it’s not actually making contact. And I was going to look to see if there’s anything I might be able to like spray on it or something that would do something similar to not allow those layers to, you know, adhere to each other or to just do it with some wax paper and see how that goes or maybe some parchment paper.

But I’m going to try a couple little things. I think what I’m going to wind up doing is do a tab and slot kind of pocket and to be able to connect those two pieces together. And then I’m going to use this chemical welding to put it together. But that’s all the things I did with the printer.

None of it involved modeling.

None of it involved actually printing anything.

Most of it was just trying to come up with a plan on how to get what I want out of the phone case.

Frank

Sometimes the logistics is the planning phase.

Chris

Yeah.

The logistics can be more than half the battle.

Kevin

In all reality, he was just protesting the decision for the topic of the week.

Frank

Trying to burn as much time as possible, right?

Andy

Just so the listeners know, we got a nice little Excel document, a Google Sheets document that we put all of our proposed topics down on.

And then we all vote on them and then kind of average out the votes to, you know, whichever one we’re doing next. That way we got the one that most people are interested in.

Frank

To be clear, we vote on episode order. So we give the episodes a preferred order. And then if you want to finish there, Andy.

Andy

So this particular topic was the one I did not want to do most. And everybody wanted to do it the most. So it’s kind of contrasted.

Not that anybody hates topics or anything like that, but it is kind of funny to have, to being so contrasted on this one particular episode.

Frank

That is except for Kevin.

Kevin always gets overruled.

Kevin

Except for this one.

Frank

Yeah. Except for this one.

Andy

I just take an average out the numbers and it does look like over the course of time here that Kevin has gotten a little bit of the shaft on us doing the ones that he finds most interesting.

So.

Frank

And Chris has been the idea generator more than the rest of us anyway. So it makes sense that the ones that he’s more interested in would have a lower score.

So.

Andy

Yeah.

But before we get started, did you print anything there, Frank?

Frank

I did. The tape dispenser that I made a little while ago has got the teeth on it for cutting the tape, but it doesn’t like to actually cut tape.

Andy

Okay.

And I tried a couple of different ways when I was working with it and ended up going with the best option, which still wasn’t great. I found another tape dispenser.

This one was actually on Thingiverse, actually, and ran it off just to see if it did better and it doesn’t. Apparently, my guess is the PLA just doesn’t like to cut tape.

There’s nothing that can be done about that, maybe.

Chris

Did you ever take a stick as a can and rub it on the sidewalk until you had a really nice sharp point?

Frank

No, Chris. I never did that.

Andy

So have you tried sharpening an edge onto the PLA to see if it would help?

Frank

Actually no, I haven’t. I do have an orbital sander in my wood shop. Maybe I should go down there and try that.

That’s a good thought.

Andy

It might be an easy solution before you try to print your way out of it further.

Chris

Or glue one of those things from an empty surround wrap box on it.

Andy

Oh, that’s a great idea.

Frank

Actually that could work, or even just an old soda can. Cut it up just right so it’s got the teeth and that’ll do it.

Chris

Yep.

Andy

You can drill little holes through it and then you can print little stubs and then you can put the, right where you need the cutter and then you can put it down so that the stubs come up through the holes and then you can take like a hot screwdriver or something and push those little weld points flat, so lock it in place.

Chris

So Harbor Freight has this neat little thing, they advertise it as a plastic welder, but it’s basically a soldering iron with different tips for melting plastic together.

Frank

Otherwise known as a wood burner, right?

Chris

Yeah, that too.

Andy

They sell it at different names

Chris

But yeah…

Frank

I mean, my dad used it as a soldering iron.

Chris

So yeah, it’s a soldering iron, plastic welder, wood burner.

It’s a heated tip, right, but you know, it’s you buy it for that purpose specifically.

So I have one that I use specifically for, you know, welding, melting plastic and one that I actually use specifically for soldering electrical components, and then I have another one that is a heat gun that I use for smoothing out plastics and things.

Frank

I still don’t have a heat gun. Maybe I should buy that toy.

Andy

I’ve got a lighter and a dedicated screwdriver.

Chris

No, get the heat gun. They’re not expensive. Really, they’re not. And they’re worth it.

Frank

Or, I could get a hairdryer and use my lighter and a dedicated screwdriver and put it all together.

Oh, and I have a variable temperature tool that is a different kind of dedicated wood burner. And I could always just use that to control the temperature of the hairdryer too.

Chris

Just have a specific tip.

Frank

Have the coil inside of the hairdryer. That could work or maybe that maybe that should go more in the using the tool for things that’s not designed for category.

Kevin

Yeah

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

The other thing that I did was I printed a statue of a character from a game that I play overwatch since we’re advertising for anything and everything right now.

Chris

I will bow to no sponsor.

Frank

I printed off a tracer figurine and am committed to looking for a different Mercy figurine because I’ve tried Mercy countless times in the last year and something to do with the way her skirt is designed just doesn’t print. And I don’t want to print the pieces because I don’t want to assemble it.

So that’s what I’ve worked on this week.

Andy

A good deal.

Kevin

All right.

Frank

So our topic that Andy has been trying to avoid is fun toys games.

Chris

So this should be right up Kevin’s alley because that’s 90% of what he prints.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

Kevin’s topic here 90% of what any of us prints is fun.

Kevin

That’s true. Yeah.

Chris

I’d say mine’s half and half.

Frank

And to be very clear figurines are not toys.

Chris

They’re action figures.

Kevin

They’re game pieces.

Frank

Right. They’re not toys.

Kevin

No.

Frank

Don’t play with that.

Chris

But they’re games.

That’s under our topic.

Frank

Yeah. Fair.

Chris

So.

Frank

And it’s all fun. Just to be clear. That’s what I was saying.

It’s all fun.

Chris

Until somebody loses a pawn.

Kevin

And then you print a new one.

Frank

So I saw one where this guy was working with, was it, was it the one that you shared, Chris?

Was that a video you shared?

Okay. Why don’t you tell the story?

Chris

So he had an 80s electronic chess set that he’d found it like a yard sale or something.

But all of the pieces have a little magnet on them. And so it’s electronic in the fact that it can tell which pieces were based on the magnet. That’s in each piece.

Right? But the game wouldn’t start because he opened it. He opened it up and dumped out all of the pieces and, you know, set up upon the chessboard and the game wouldn’t start because he was missing a pawn. And so he goes, okay, well, I know how to fix this.

So he printed a new pawn with a magnet at the right Gauss level, I guess, in the pawn. So he took the time to make a whole brand new pawn for this so it would work again. And he goes, okay, now it’s time to clean up the clean up the contacts on the inside. And so he opens the back of the back of the case and outfalls out the last one.

Andy

I didn’t watch that part of the video. I missed the most important part.

Chris

Yeah.

Frank

Just enough to make you go, “Oh man! Why did I put so much time into this thing?”

We all like to put time into this thing. My tape dispenser was a fun toy to print.

Chris

I mean, I love printing, you know, fun little things for the kid. She loves them.

Frank

I print the fun little things from my wife, actually, little dragons and got an articulated snake and the Valentine’s Day dragon with the roses for each of the segments.

Chris

That was pretty cool.

Kevin

Yeah, that was awesome.

Frank

Technically, I guess those all count as toys. They’re meant to be played with anyway, so.

Kevin

I tried 3D printing a articulated bat for my nephew. It was one of those print in place things designed for an FDM printer.

It didn’t work. And I didn’t have a really trouble shot it to see why it didn’t work.

Chris

You know, sometimes some of those print in place kinds of things you can add supports yourself on the inside.

kevin

Yeah.

Chris

And then they’ll kind of just break apart and fall out once you start, once you pull it off and start, you know, moving it around.

Kevin

That’s what I was attempting.

Frank

There’s also the point where print in place projects are actually kind of meant to be printed in the order, you know, the layers in the order that they are when you get the STL and because for your printer, the print bed is upside down compared to an FDM.

I wonder if you could flip it over and print it that way.

Kevin

It would still print from the bottom up though.

Frank

But the top of the part would be on your build plate instead of the bottom?

Kevin

No.

Chris

No.

Kevin

No, the bottom of the part is on the build plate. It prints upside down.

Frank

No, that’s what I’m saying though.

Kevin

No, no. I mean, when it finishes printing, the part that you’ve printed is upside down. It’s dangling from the build plate upside down.

Andy

So slice it upside down is what he’s saying.

Chris

But it does print from the same, same layer on the bottom going toward the top of the print.

The print is just upside down when you’re done.

Andy

He’s saying slice it upside down. So the print is still right side up, even though it’s printing from the top to the bottom.

Kevin

So this, okay.

Chris

I like that. I want to fix it.

Kevin

We’re doing the great visual listening again.

This is what it looks like on the build plate. That is the dude’s head.

Andy

So why do you print them upside down?

Chris

And that’s the last thing to print.

kevin

Because that’s how it works.

Andy

I’m just kidding.

I don’t know printed place ones how that would effect…

Frank

No.

I’m thinking backwards anyway, because my spatial orientation is weird.

You’re right, Kevin. I’m sorry.

Chris

It would still print feet to head.

Yes.

Frank

Spatially oriented Frank is only a little drunk.

Andy

No, you’re fine.

You’re fine.

Kevin

It’s a system you’re not accustomed to working with.

Frank

That too.

I feel like we’ve asked a lot of questions and I feel like I would be in a good starting place if I ever got a STL printer or SLA printer.

“They’re all STL printers, Frank.”

Anyway.

You didn’t say it so I figured I would.

I feel like I’m in a good place to start, but there’s some things that you can only learn by doing. Right?

Kevin

Yup

Andy

Yeah.

True.

Chris

But yeah, as you were saying, Frank, yeah, I didn’t realize I print a lot of fun things for the wife also, you know,

Frank

Just to get that little squeal of joy from the women we love.

Chris

So well, you guys already know that my wife already has a pretty extensive dragon figurine collection.

Andy

That’s underestimating it.

So yes, extensive is.

Frank

Andy’s collection of foxes is comparable, I think.

Chris

Yeah, exactly.

So I try to save it for special occasions. I think I’ve only printed her like four different dragon things in the past year. So.

Andy

Okay.

Frank

It’s not bad.

Chris

Yeah.

Frank

That’s some serious reservation there.

Chris

Yeah. Well, you got to, you got to span it out so that the house doesn’t get cluttered with, you know, plastic prints.

Andy

It is kind of hard to 3D print more storage space in a house.

Frank

Since Kevin did it.

I’m going to show you my collection of 3D prints.

That whole bookshelf, the front of it is all 3D prints while the back of it is all the books.

Andy

That’s impressive.

Chris

Wow.

Andy

That’s a four tier, what two and a half foot wide bookshelf.

Frank

Yeah, I’d say 18 to two foot 18 inches to two foot deep.

Andy

Okay.

Frank

And I do have some stuff that I didn’t print like a dragon that my dad had cut out when he was at work. And a Lego figurine that I put up and a plushie that came with my laptop. But pretty much everything else up there is 3D printed in some way or another.

Chris

Oh, that reminds me Legos. You can 3D print Lego Lego attachments.

Frank

Yeah. When you want the bigger plate that you can’t get without spending a serious amount of time looking and money.

Andy

Like it’s had me print weird, weird Lego things for him as well. Yeah.

Chris

Yeah.

Andy

I mean, you’re not going to get that Lego quality, you know, clip pieces together, but it comes fairly close.

Frank

It makes for a good little base though.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

Did you, did you decide, did you design it yourself or did you find it somewhere on Thingiverse or whatever?

Andy

The ones he had me make, I designed myself. He wanted a plow, this plow thing for a train. I’m not going to question his logic, but.

Frank

You mean the cattleguard or was it an actual plow?

Kevin

It was an actual plow. I remember seeing the posts about designing it and showing off and stuff. It was neat. It was really cool looking, but I didn’t realize it was for a train when he was posting pictures.

Andy

Yeah.

No, no, no.

It wasn’t a train. It was a boat.

That was the thing. It was a boat. It was even weirder.

Frnak

So a plow for a boat.

I can see not making as much sense for a train.

It does make sense. They make some serious plows for trains and they’re kind of cool.

Chris

It’s for, it’s for the Arctic explorers.

Frank

Just get a flat bottom boat.

What the ice breakers are.

Andy

But you know, it was an opportunity to…

Frank

Flat bottomed boats they make the rockin’ world go round… Anyway.

Andy

It was an opportunity to sit down with the kid and design something together.

So even if it’s something weird, I don’t understand. It was for his project at the time. So. Yeah.

Chris

So yeah, being able to print various toys is invaluable for those of us with kids, you know,

Frank

Can we take a moment and appreciate how resistant Andy was about talking about this project and he’s got some actual feedback to provide.

Chris

Right.

Frank

And experience.

Andy

Yeah.

I did a rubber rocket toy. That’s, I think the only toy I’ve ever printed still floating around here somewhere. But I did the print I did with TPU.

Frank

So you did the glow in the dark solar system.

Andy

Yeah, that’s true.

That wasn’t really…

Frank

Kind of not a toy

Andy

…but decoration.

Frank

It falls in the fun, fun category.

Chris

That’s true.

Andy

And I, I, I want to, to, to point out too, to the listeners that my, my son was four, I think, and he drew out the planets on the white board, just playing around and even got some of that we didn’t even know about, like serious or seris or something like that.

A couple of the planetoids that aren’t just Pluto who drew all that kind of stuff in as a four year old. And it was, it was kind of impressive and neat.

We left it up on the board. It kind of turned into something special because I was always pointing to that telling everybody, my four year old figured that out. And I didn’t even know about some of those objects he put in, but you look them up, they’re there.

And so I wanted to take in like good pictures of it, bringing it into my CAD software and making glow in the dark, you know, like the stars on your ceiling that you had in us 80s kids had.

Well, I made that kind of same idea with some VHF tape and glow in the dark, but I made the planets that he drew as he drew them. So they look like a four year old drew them, but that was the intent.

They’re exactly what he drew.

And they’re now stuck up in my, in my three year olds room now on his ceiling.

Frank

If he ever grows out of them, are you going to put them up in your own bedroom?

Andy

I just might.

No, I hate light in my room.

I put, I taped foil to my windows for God’s sakes to make it as black in here as possible.

Frank

Fair.

Kevin

I painted over my window.

Andy

You painted your window?

Kevin

Yeah. A nice moonlit ocean scape with a lighthouse and a windmill on it.

Andy

Oh, okay. That’s cool.

Frank

That’s interesting.

I mean, you own the house. It’s not like your landlord’s going to cry about it.

Kevin

Right.

Well, it’s a picture window.

So I said, might as well make a picture out of it.

Yeah.

And, you know, you guys ever move out, which, you know, let’s face it, odds are you will eventually move out of the house.

The next people that live there are going to have to think real hard about what they want to replace it or not.

Chris

Yeah.

Weird kind of thing like that. Like my house used to belong to a photographer. So he had a, you know, double basin sink and a dark room doubled as the laundry room.

Right.

So I mean, nobody does photography like that anymore. So obviously I had to get rid of the sinks and things, but, you know, he had an actual photo wall and just the, the, the painting on it was immaculate. Plus it was done with some sort of epoxy epoxy paint.

So it’s not so easy to remove.

Frank

When you’re not planning on moving, you do some interestingly permanent stuff. or I semi-permanent.

Chris

The wife and I tasked her dad with making shelves over it. And as you guys can see, I’ve sent you guys pictures of, of the setup and beautiful.

That, that painted background is the background for these shelves.

That’s great.

Andy

I remember you showing pictures of that. That is a really pretty setup.

Kevin

Yeah.

Chris

Looks like we did it on purpose.

Frank

That’s always the goal, right? Make it look on purpose.

Yeah.

Um, it’s been a while since I quoted my dad.

So I’ll drag this one up.

He always, uh, well, not always, but periodically he’d look at me and go, “so what do you think the difference is between the master and the apprentice?”

Like, I don’t know. Cause I forget what it was when he said it six months ago or whatever.

He says “the master knows how to avoid mistakes better, compensate for their mistakes.” And it’s like, you know, that makes sense.

There’s a lot of skill out there, but it’s not very masterful until they get some experience and make it masterful. Right.

So you got to start somewhere. And that’s why 10,000 hours is the, uh, apocryphal barrier to master ship, master hood, whatever.

Kevin

Mastery.

Frank

Mastery.

There you go.

Good word.

To the guy that speaks science.

Um, but yeah, it’s the little things that you’ve learned to account for without thinking about it over time that you just, you can’t learn about any other way.

Kevin

Yeah.

Frank

And we got off topic a little bit. Any, any more fun toys or games?

Chris

Well, there’s that thing you posted this week.

Uh, so I didn’t know that you had a switch there, Frank.

Frank

Oh, uh, yeah, that was last week. I actually even talked about printing the joy con controllers.

Chris

Yep.

Frank

But yeah

Kevin

Yeah, we did.

Frank

So, um, making those.

Chris

Yep.

I’m gonna be a big fan of, uh, get console accessories and what have you, as you know.

Frank

Gonna be?

I mean, you, you’ve got an Atari, right? And basically every system from there to the Xbox.

Chris

And I’ve still got something on it, but yeah, I’ve got, I’ve got a few of those.

Yeah.

Frank

Add the switch and you’ve got quite the collection of, well, you had quite the collection before the switch, the switch connects naturally to your, to modern TVs, where the other stuff takes some finagling.

Chris

Yeah.

But you know, yeah, I’m going to be printing stuff for, uh, a controller controller holders, uh, headphone holders, all in all, just more, more accessory spacers, et cetera, for all the consoles. And there’s loads of stuff that you can just find. You don’t even have to try to design anything yourself.

People have already made it and you can just get it because all of these old consoles are so popular.

Frank

Who’da thunk that there would be so many enthusiasts for outdated technology in the 3d printing world.

Andy

There’s a lot.

This hobby goes right along with so many other closely, you know, DIY kind of stuff.

Frank

Yeah.

Andy

If you’re into like old classics like that, you’re probably doing a lot of repairs and stuff like that on your own.

Frank

And looking for components that supporter are, uh, body, you know, control the appearance of the device that just can only be replaced.

Kevin

Right.

Andy

Yeah.

Chris

Yep. Very true.

A lot of these things are made out of plastic and you know, a lot of these…

Frank

The door on the old NES.

Chris

Yeah.

Well, almost the entire old NES is, is plastic and I actually broke a couple of the, the stands when I had to take mine apart.

So a couple of posts that hold the board in, hold the board up in place. Um, broke when I had to take it apart to fix the, uh, um, uh, the 72 pin connector.

So, um, I glued them back in place, but you know, if anything else were to kind of happen, you know, it wouldn’t be a stretch that I’d have to print in a new case or a new part of the case or something.

It’s nice to have the tool that allows you to do that instead of having to find one at the, uh, secondhand store or something like that.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

Pay for one on the eBay.

Chris

Well, lots of people are getting into, into collecting these things too. So you can’t really find them at, find them at the, uh, secondhand store anymore.

And if you do, you know, if, if you do, you are the lucky one.

Frank

Right.

Well, and you know, there’s folks that go to the store every week just to see what they can pick up in that regard.

Chris

So. Yeah.

I don’t know anybody that, I don’t know anybody that does that.

Frank

Maybe, maybe Chris, maybe that’s because you are that person.

Kevin

Are you suggesting that Chris doesn’t know himself?

Chris

Don’t.

Okay.

Just don’t tell the wife.

Okay.

Frank

It’s just one of those situations where if you don’t know that person, that means you are that person.

Kevin

True.

Chris

Yeah.

So we covered what we print, we print stuff for the kids and then stuff for our game, uh, our consoles.

And then Kevin does all kinds of stuff for board games.

Kevin

Yeah.

Frank

Well, I do all kinds of stuff that I see is toys. But, uh, then I call the hardware store and the, the thrift hardware store, all toy shops.

Kevin

So yeah.

I will eventually print up a set for Nightmare Chess. I think I’ve talked about that before.

Frank

A little bit.

Kevin

Um, because the, it’s meant, it’s cards that are meant to go with a regular chess set, but then some of the cards modify the game in a way that you have to bring out extra bits of stuff or have extra pieces for like the princess or the warlord. And it would just be easier to print it up and have the princess be a designated piece.

Another thing that I wanted to talk about, um, is that a lot of people in the gaming community will get an SLA printer so that they can save a lot of money when they, uh, want to feed their warhammer addiction or similar war game, uh, where you have to go buy armies and armies of miniatures, excuse me, and, uh, they, I even recently saw a post from somebody, um, talking about the cost of buying an entire warhammer 40k army compared to the cost of buying a 3D printer and just printing up the figures himself out of resin.

And a lot of people were, were questioning it, saying, well, how much does the resin cost? How much does the printer cost?

And he said, look, I’m going to, the, the army is going to end up costing me $500 if I buy it from the manufacturer. Or can get this printer for $200 and for $100 worth of resin, I can have all of the army.

Frank

And then he’s got it. So the next time he wants to print an army, all he needs to do is pay for the resin.

Kevin

Right.

Chris

And he’s got a tool that can print other stuff.

Kevin

Right.

Frank

In the meantime. Yeah. There you go.

Kevin

There was a Kickstarter campaign a while back for a game called the others, the seven deadly sins.

And I, I backed it and I kept trying to get the creators to introduce Lilith, the mother of sin as one of the specialty big bads.

And they didn’t.

And so I said during that campaign that if they did not, I would get a 3D printer and print up my own Lilith and create the character myself.

I haven’t done that yet. 3D modeling turned out to be a lot more of a challenge than I anticipated when that Kickstarter campaign was going on.

Frank

Yeah.

That may be a topic for another episode.

Kevin

Yeah.

Frank

Learning from scratch with no context, how to use say a 3D modeler.

Kevin

Right.

Frank

Well, or a CAD program is time consuming.

Andy

Especially when you forget YouTube exists.

Frank

Well, even if you know YouTube exists, there’s Kevin’s experience with you have to have some context for the program or else you get lost halfway through. And all of a sudden the thing’s done and you’re going, how did you get from there to there?

Chris

Yeah. And following, following people through their video isn’t always as easy as you’d think it is.

Andy

It’s a lot of pausing and wondering what the hell they clicked on to make that window pop up.

We can’t tell.

Frank

Or they’re using a different version of the software and you go, I don’t have that option.

Where did that option go?

What is that option?

Yeah.

Kevin

Yeah.

Frank

Maybe they’re using an add-on that was not identified and they use it so much they don’t remember it’s an add-on.

I’ve seen that a few times in the software world.

Kevin

It’s easy to do when you have add-ons.

Frank

Yeah. I agree with that.

Chris

Yeah. I’ve seen people have made lots of little figures for settlers of Catan and stuff too.

Kevin

Oh, and my sister has a game called Winged Span and she got little bird figurines for it to replace the little cardboard bird tokens that came with the game.

She got them off Etsy and I looked at it and I said, hey, these were 3D printed with an FDM printer.

She said, yeah, how could you tell? And I said, because the resolution isn’t very good.

If I had printed them, they would look superb.

Andy

I love you too, Kevin. I mean, you might be right, but God, man.

Frank

You know what? Increasing my resolution to five layers a millimeter instead of four has made a lot of difference.

Chris

Well, I think they were printed by somebody that didn’t care about their resolution because they were selling something quick and easy.

Kevin

Right.

Frank

Which is unfortunate because if you’re taking money for something, you should put out quality.

Kevin

Right.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

But there’s that word again. I can’t help it. I just used it again and that’s why it’s a bad word though, right?

Chris

Well, your S word and my S word.

Frank

Sneaks into your vocabulary.

Kevin

Right.

Well, it’s because usually when you’re saying it, it’s because you’re describing something the way it ought to be, but it’s not.

Frank

And that ought to be is based off of an ideal that is not necessarily rational.

Kevin

Right.

Frank

I use it for plausible deniability.

It should have been like that.

I should have done that.

Frank

We know this, Chris. And we chuckle at you every time because there are so many other uses for the word that have nothing to do with plausible deniability.

Chris

Well, my S word is snow. Your S word is should.

Frank

Yeah, I don’t mind the snow so much, but that’s because my ancestors are from the north.

Andy

I like not having the hot temperatures. That part’s nice about winter.

Frank

Yeah.

Chris

Yeah.

Frank

It’s easier to warm up than it is to cool off. Right.

Andy

Amen.

Amen.

Frank

And I don’t like sweat, you know, especially when it goes down in uncomfortable places.

Chris

I guess there’s another S word for the day.

Frank

Uncomfortable is not an S word.

Kevin

Sweat.

Frank

Got you.

Chris

There’s there’s our other S word for today.

Andy

I think Frank should just purge all S words out of its vocabulary. It would solve so many problems

Frank

That would make it really hard to use certain words, though.

Are we talking about the S phoneme, that ssss, or just the letter S?

Chris

We can just give you a, we can just give you a lisp and you’re done.

Frank

No, that’s, that’s mean.

Chris

That is.

Andy

Get older and you’ll have that S whistle whenever you talk.

Frank

We’re already older.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

That’s how we started this episode.

Maybe that’s how we should end it. Because we are the old people now.

We’re not quite elderly. We’re just old.

Chris

Old enough to know better.

Kevin

I don’t know that I’d say we’re old, but I would say I would agree that we are middle aged.

Frank

That’s why we got the printer, right? That was our midlife crisis.

Chris

Thank God it wasn’t a sports car.

Frank

That would be so difficult to pay off. But we do belong in the generation that is apparently ruining the world. So rather than spending money, we don’t have on a sports car. We spend money on a 3D printer that we can afford.

Kevin

Right.

Chris

That sounds right.

Frank

And we’re ruining the economy by doing stuff like that.

Kevin

I got a comic from my manager at work a couple of years ago. He had a joke a day or a comic a day on New Yorker calendar. And one of the days it showed a guy on a motorcycle with training wheels. And the caption was “Kevin’s midlife crisis crisis.”

I have it laminated and it’s sitting on my desk.

Frank

Oh, well, You are the guy that rides his motorcycle for the two seconds it takes to get to work.

Kevin

Actually, it takes more than two seconds, because work is now like six miles away rather than half a mile away.

Frank

and there’s a light in there so…

Chris

And that’s still it’s still a really nice commute.

Kevin

And then in June, it’s going to be like a mile and a half.

And

Okay.

Kevin

But the lab is moving to the building that everybody thought it should have been put in in the first place.

Chris

Yeah, that’s a good s word.

Frank

It’s still should though.

It’s still problematic.

Well, why don’t we call it?

Andy

Yeah, we should probably wrap this up.

Frank

Anybody runs into me and public and recognizes me.

They’re just going to look at me and go SHOULD.

Kevin

Should, should should should should.

Frank

AH! My ears… no.

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

Chris

We know it was hard.

Frank

…and full of s words.

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

We are available through a wide variety of podcast vendors and so are easy to share.

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

We’ll be sure to fill it up with s words.

You can find us in our Facebook group, amateur3dpod, or you can email us at panelists@amateur3dpod.com.

For individual feedback you can email us at Franklin, Kevin, Andy or Chris@amateur3dpod.com.

The music in this episode was written by Kevin Buckner.

OpenAI’s whisper completed the heavy lifting for the transcripts, which you can find linked in the description below.

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 FEP tight.

Chris

Sign off all ya suckers.

Andy

Andy should definitely say something.

Frank

So I had a realization a little while ago and since I’m the youngest in this group, I imagine you guys have had it too.

We’re the old people now.

Kevin

Yeah.

Chris

Yeah, my neck’s been telling me that for weeks.

Frank

When we were 20, 40 year olds were not trustworthy and were stingy old bastards, right?

Kevin

Yeah.

Andy

Now that we can’t trust a drive.

Frank

Yeah. Now that we’re there, we’re like, oh, you poor little thing.

You poor child.

Kevin

Yeah, there was something just this last week.

I don’t remember what we were talking about, but I was like, yeah, I was doing that 33 years ago.

Oh my goodness. I can remember doing something 33 years ago.

Frank

I’m coming up on my 20 year graduation.

Chris

Oh yeah, I completely missed mine.

kevin

I knew about mine, but I was on a cruise in the Caribbean at the time.

Frank

So I would weigh that one is heavier than the high school reunion as well.

Andy

I can’t remember what happened.

There’s a good reason for mine too that I missed it.

Frank

Yeah, Andy, your wife and I are in the same graduating year.

Andy

Yeah.

Yeah.

So those friends are still existing within that three year range or so.

Yeah, they’re getting old.