Frank
Thank you for joining us.
This is episode 33 of Amateur 3D Podcast, a podcast by amateur printers, for amateur printers, where we share our thoughts and experience.
Our panelists this week are me, Franklin Christensen, and my friends, Andy Cottom, Kevin Buckner, and Chris Weber.
And I’m pretty sure this is the earliest we’re ever going to record, 10 a.m.
Chris
Yeah, my coffee’s still hot.
Andy
That is a little unusual for us.
Frank
Well.
And I don’t think it’s so much that any of us, except for maybe Chris, have a problem with waking up early on a Saturday.
It’s just we don’t want to do stuff at 10 a.m. on a Saturday.
Chris
I’m always doing something at 10 a.m. on a Saturday, but usually it’s…
Frank
We don’t need to hear about these things, Chris.
Chris
Cooking breakfast.
Frank
Especially not while we’re recording.
Andy
He’s got to pay the bill somehow.
Give him a break.
Chris
You got a problem with eggs and bacon?
Frank
Well, I think it was Penn and Teller that said that any plural can be a
Andy
sexual innuendo.
Frank
Yeah.
Chris
Yeah, don’t hate… Don’t hate my eggs, man.
Kevin
It’s not your eggs that I’m questioning.
Chris
Yeah.
No.
Turkey bacon does not taste all that great.
Andy
I love turkey bacon.
Frank
I imagine that being allergic to pork, the thing that you enjoy the taste of more than anything is the pork.
It’s just the after effects that you don’t care for, right?
Chris
Yeah.
It’s not pleasant.
Kevin
I think that’s how I would be, too.
I’m glad the only allergies I have are the medicines.
Frank
I don’t think I have any allergies.
No.
I’m used to.
I am allergic to abject stupidity.
Andy
I think I have a weird reaction to bananas.
You can’t eat bananas very comfortably.
Frank
Yeah.
I have that same reaction to stupidity.
I just can’t stand it.
Andy
Makes your mouth itch, huh?
Frank
It makes my mouth itch.
It gives me indigestion.
Andy
So that’s why you always got to lay down for a little while after the podcast, I take it.
Frank
It’s thanks to you, Andy, no.
There’s some people that just get rent for free in my head, and I have, I wish I could do more about it.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
But letting myself ruminate on it for a couple of days is probably the best thing I can think up to do because then it doesn’t consume me any longer than that.
Andy
Really?
Frank
Yeah.
Andy
Rumination is torture for me.
That’s the worst thing that could happen in my head is rumination.
Frank
It is for me, too.
But if I spend all of the bandwidth trying not to think about the thing, I end up thinking about it and being upset with myself for thinking about it for like a week.
So if I let myself just focus on it, then it’s done.
Andy
Yeah.
I’ve got an ADD question for you.
Frank
Okay.
Andy
I wouldn’t say suffer ADD, but you experience it on a regular basis.
I was talking to my wife, and she’s got it pretty good, too.
And we were just kind of talking in the bathroom this morning while we were brushing our teeth and whatnot saying it would be interesting, really interesting to step into each other’s head.
That way you can see the oddities of the way things work.
I would love for somebody to be able to understand my like one track, audio track that I have to cram everything into, you know, little things like that, my subtitles track.
And one of the things that she mentioned that was really kind of weird, she says that she’s always like explaining everything she does to somebody else, just imagining that conversation in her head all the time.
I was curious if that was an ADD thing or if my wife’s just a little weird.
Frank
Probably a little of both.
Andy
You think?
Kevin
I was going to say, I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive there.
Frank
Yeah.
Okay.
So it’s real hard and I didn’t expect to do a TED talk on it during our podcast.
But there’s a full spectrum of functionality, right?
You get the top 4%.
These people have the eidetic memory or photographic memory as you may know it better.
They can hyper thread in their brain and they can do all of the things, right?
Andy
This is the ADD superpowers, right?
Frank
No, no, no, no.
This is the top 4% of functionality in the world.
Oh, okay.
I see what you’re saying.
We’ve known somebody who could literally hyper thread.
She could take notes on two different subjects with both hands.
Wow.
And the notes would be different words and all that and she would be doing it concurrently.
Literal hyper threading multitasking.
I don’t know how she did it.
It is generally speaking unless you’re in the top 4% impossible, right?
Most people have that single core processor.
So that’s the top 4% and then the bottom 4% is what gets classified as ADD or ADHD is the modern evolution of that.
I remember when we were young, I don’t know why so many adults put so much credence in what they were told when they were five by other five-year-olds, but we do it, right?
Andy
Yeah, we do.
Frank
But there was a distinction between ADD and ADHD, which is one is for adults and one of them is for children and the answer is no, ADHD is the evolution of ADD.
As they learned more, they were like, hmm, these brains look the same, but they’re doing different things.
Maybe we should classify them together.
Anyway.
So at the bottom 4% of functionality, got to think it’s called executive functions, things that allow you to identify social cues.
Time management is an issue for a lot of ADHDers.
Memory, I have a memory that puts me in the bottom 10% of the world.
Things like that, right?
So when you look at the bell curve, the quote unquote typical person being closer to the average or the middle, and as you get farther away from that, obviously you have that top 4% I was talking about earlier, and then you have the bottom 4% that I live and your wife lives in.
So 85% of that bottom 4% haven’t been tested for it.
They just live with it.
So that’s a projection that 4% actually lives with it based off of millions and millions of data points from statistical analysis.
There are 12 metrics for hyperactive and 12 metrics for attention deficit…
When you’re an adult, and the definition for adult is fluid.
When you’re an adult, you have to have five in one of those categories as a minimum.
If you have four, no dice.
So those are like five percenters that have four and some variety thereof.
But that 4% has everything from the five data points to all 12 in one section.
So there’s millions of possibilities or millions of combinations between the two that could put you on the spectrum from hyperactive to attention deficit.
Andy
Okay.
That’s a lot more complicated than I thought it was.
Like I knew it was complicated, but yeah, hearing it written out like that kind of shows that.
Frank
And I like the math of it because when people abuse statistics, it pisses me off.
So when I can give, like I’ve dug into the mathematics of this a little bit, and it’s like, how do people deny this?
This is not the kind of thing that is quantifiably ignorable.
Andy
Yeah.
Chris
There’s too much data.
Only 23% of people back their statements up with statistics.
Frank
Are you sure it’s not 20?
Chris
No, 23 sounds like a more reasonable number to make up on the spot.
Frank
Actually…
Andy
I’ve heard like it’s only like 5% of natural statistics are made up on the spot.
Frank
I’ve always heard it somewhere between 90 and 96.
Now there is an interesting thing about numbers when they’re being made up in your head.
The number five feels too common, even numbers feel too common.
So when they go to evaluate a company’s books to see if they’re being cooked, they will look for a large number of threes and sevens, and if there’s a large, I mean, there should be in truly random numbers, a large body of them, an even number of all of the digits, right?
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
If there is an abnormally large number of threes and sevens, it’s a high indication that those books have been cooked.
I’ve heard of that study that they did and can completely agree whenever I’m thinking of making up a number of some things, like seven tends to be my go-to random number, which doesn’t exactly make it very random.
Frank
Right.
Chris
Yeah.
I personally avoid it because a lot of people pick seven as a lucky number.
Kevin
It’s just way too common.
Frank
And it’s because, like I said, fives are super common in our head.
We think, oh, it’s divisible by five, it can’t be random.
Or if it’s an even number, we think, oh, that’s a super common number too.
I don’t want to choose it because it won’t be random.
But the truly random numbers include everything from zero to nine for digits.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
So, yeah.
Kevin
It’s like our brains gravitate toward the prime numbers saying, this one seems random to me.
Frank
Well, okay.
So, man, this TED talk is all over the place.
Andy and I had a challenge that we did to find all of the prime numbers, compute all the prime numbers between one and, what did we decide, 100,000?
Andy
It was an arbitrary big number.
Yeah.
Frank
Yeah, 100,000.
Andy
The whole idea was who could program the program the fastest that could find all of those numbers and stuff.
I love little challenges like that.
That was awesome.
Frank
And about that time, I was told about what’s called the sieve of Eratosthenes.
Most people know him as the guy that proved the earth was round mathematically 300 years before the time of Christ.
But he also created a method for finding prime numbers where we already learned some of this in elementary school, but two is the first prime number and any number that is even after that can’t be prime because it’s divisible by two.
Yeah.
Well, that rule applies to every prime number.
Right?
So, you go to three and then you remove everything that’s divisible by three.
Part of your job is already done because all the even numbers are gone.
Yeah.
Four has already been removed, five, everything that hasn’t been removed already, this divisible by five is gone.
And so, you can find, once you get to say the square root of 100, which is 10, once you get to seven, you found every prime number that is less than 100 because everything that is prime higher than seven or everything that is still there after you get to seven is a prime number.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
And there’s only like 10 or 15, less than 100.
But when we programmed it, we were able to find, I want to say, hundreds of prime numbers below a million in a matter of like two seconds.
Andy
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was fast.
We were rocking it when we were doing it.
We were getting it pretty up there for speed.
Frank
I agree.
That was fun.
I haven’t come across a good challenge like that in a while.
If I do, I’ll have to fire up our little challenge again.
Andy
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was a good time.
Frank
So, Andy, have you done anything with your 3D printer this week?
Andy
Yeah.
I did do one project.
I have a van that’s a bus, a mini bus.
That’s our secondary vehicle at the house.
Long story why we have a mini bus for that, but just take it for what it is.
We do have that.
And the door handle on it, that when you’re inside the arm rest slash handle to close the door, suddenly became very loose and looking at it, it’s got two screws that hold that down.
And the two screws, the only thing that was actually mounting that arm rest piece was the pleather that made up the outside.
The plastic that formed the whole underside of it that it was hooked to, it was just disintegrating and had broken free.
So I wound up unscrewing everything and taking some measurements.
The both of the screw holes for it were completely shattered and it’s really old brittle plastic.
So I didn’t want to just try to glue it back together.
So instead, I wound up taking and 3D printing a section of plastic that can go in between with the room available, go in between the plastic and how it connected to the rest of the door itself.
And that gave me like eight millimeters worth of space.
And so I was able to print a brand new section that was just as large as the arm rest itself.
And that way I could have a lot of glue surface to what plastic was left over on the underside of that.
And then that printed piece would also be the screw holes that could mount it to the door.
And that way everything could still mount up correctly and at the same height and all that kind of stuff, but I wouldn’t be relying on the little two screw holes that it had of the bad plastic and instead relying on the whole underside of the bad plastic that I just JB welded to my plastic printed part.
But I was able to 3D print in PETG, just a solid piece of, it’s about eight millimeter plastic of a certain shape that kind of fit between the two and after it got done, it felt really good.
I love it when you print stuff solid.
And it gives the 3D print such a different, like heavier, kind of bulky, real kind of feel to it, you know, and put it back together and load it up in the bus and it feels just like the other side does like it’s supposed to.
So it was kind of a nice easy little fix for that moment.
It would have been nice to have used my brand new scanner that I bought to have taken and scanned the broken area of the plastic.
And then I could have 3D printed something that would have fit perfectly into that broken part, but I’m getting a little disappointed in that scanner that I bought and I don’t think it has anything to do with the actual scanner itself.
It’s just my expectations of what these 3D scanners can accomplish.
I think is a little higher than what they’re actually capable of doing.
The more I play with mine each time, the more I’m just really kind of not too impressed with it.
I’ve seen some of the models that I’ve thrown up that I’ve scanned of my kids toys or whatever just playing with it and they’re, I mean, they work.
They work really good, but the quality is just not what I was really expecting.
Frank
Like a little poly representation of…
Andy
Yeah.
Yeah, pretty much.
Chris
Kind of if you made a rough shape out of Play-Doh.
Andy
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And so I don’t think it’s a complete loss.
Like if I had to make something, this armrest would have been a great example for that, but I was just too much not understanding how to use it to use it for that.
But I think that’s probably the only situation that’s really quite useful to me for right now is if I got to attach or glue in a piece of 3D printed material into something that’s broken, I could scan that broken surface and then use that surface to cut a 3D printed model so that it would fit properly or be able to glue into place really easily.
That kind of stuff probably would work.
But for right now, that’s the only thing that seems to be really good.
The amount of money I spent on it, I’m not thinking that was worth it at this point.
But anything that I’m going to scan to like recreate or something, I’m feeling like it is so much better to rebuild it in CAD than to try to scan it.
Anything that is a couple of instructions or most components are a couple of instructions in CAD to recreate, and you can recreate it very precisely.
So it’s not even too laborious of a task, but yeah, that’s been my experience so far with 3D printing this week, is that repair and playing with the scanner a few times and kind of being a little disappointed with it, unfortunately.
Andy
How about you?
What have you guys been up to?
Chris
Well, my printer has been sitting idle this week.
Andy
Has it?
Chris
Yep.
Yeah.
What’s with that?
I don’t have to print anything to prove myself to you guys.
Andy
Sounds like someone feels bad for not using their machine all week.
How about you Kev? What have you been up to?
Kevin
I have been printing a larger dice tower.
So one of the first things I did when I worked out all the kinks of my resin printer was I printed a dice tower that I had found on Thingiverse, and the guy said that he had made it each component of it with resin printers in mind.
My build plate was a little too small.
I had to print the pieces on their sides in order to get them to fit, but it still worked.
I’ve been playing role-playing games with my brother-in-law who went and got himself some nice fancy metal dice that are about a millimeter or two too large for the original sized dice tower, because I don’t think I had to scale it down to make it work on my resin printer.
I might have had to scale it down just a little bit, but it was fine for most applications.
So what I’ve been doing with my FDM printer is I went and found the same pieces.
I mean, I still have them.
I just wanted to make sure.
I went back on Thingiverse just to see if there was an update or whatever, and I found that there were a couple of additional pieces that I could print, but anyway, I scaled it up about 30%, and I’ve been printing that.
I’m almost done with it.
It’s an awesome-looking dice tower.
It’s got three different channels that the dice can go down when you’re using it, and so the pieces that I found on it are to…
One of them is a randomizer, so you drop the thing, the dice in the top hole, and then it goes, and it’ll kind of mix up where they go, because we’ve had it where you just kind of toss the die into one of the three holes at the top, and you know where it’s going to go, and so this will make it a little more interesting to use, and it’s bigger.
It took the holes from being 30 millimeters to 40 millimeters, and then on my resin printer, last week, Heroforge was having a sale on their STLs, and so my brother-in-law bought an STL that he emailed me, and then one of my friends bought three that he emailed to me, so I’ve been printing miniatures for those guys.
Andy
Well, that’s kind of fun.
Frank
Yeah.
Chris
Nice.
Kevin
Yeah.
Chris
So, yeah, more holes means more fun.
Frank
Yeah, like that.
Andy
So what have you been working on, Frank?
Frank
I actually spent all week iterating through a redesign for some blocks.
These are children’s blocks that look kind of like Legos, except they’re 100 millimeters long, not meters, wow, 100 millimeters long, and 50 wide.
Andy
Okay.
Chris
So they’re like the Duplo mega blocks or whatever, right?
Frank
Yeah.
I don’t know where my mom got them.
I almost wonder if she got them as like something from Tupperware back in the day or whatever, but I have got six iterations, five, six, six iterations that I went through just to realize that I probably should have started from the other end of the block, so I designed the underside first and it fit perfectly on the original, and then six iterations or five more iterations after that, I realized I am not getting the correct tightness inside from the little protrusions, the nubs.
Andy
Okay.
Frank
So I need to go back and I need to redesign the whole thing from the nubs down and design the block around them instead of the way I did it.
And little things like that are one reason or just the one little thing that I don’t so much like about Fusion is they, their design procedure is, I can’t remember if it’s top down or bottom up, but whatever it is means that everything is interdependent on everything else.
Andy
Okay.
Frank
And I spent more time fixing my drawing than I did actually fixing the design.
Andy
Okay.
So I think we’ve all been there who uses CAD software every once in a while, that could be a mess, decide you want to change something, go in and you break the whole darn thing.
Frank
I actually almost decided that maybe I should redesign this thing in Blender.
That might be a better learning procedure for me in the first place, but might be a better environment for redesigning it too.
Andy
Yeah.
It’d give you a nice opportunity to learn a lot of the intricate stuff Blender.
Frank
Yeah.
For smooth stuff anyway.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
Smooth and square.
Chris
I’m just picturing Frank acting like a five-year-old.
I’m putting a block in the Blender.
Frank
Well.
Yeah.
That too.
Well, my mother started off with like 50 of them and she’s down to 35 or so.
So something happened to those.
Chris
Kids usually happen to those.
Frank
Three children, well, and all of the grandchildren and another grandchild on the way.
Chris
So that’s just one of those kind of tools or toys, toys.
Like I had some for my kid too and now that the child is older, we have passed them on to be shared over at grandma’s house.
Yeah.
With her cousins and things.
Andy
That’s good.
Yeah, the blocks you showed are ones I’ve never, I’ve never seen something like that before.
I mean, they kind of look like the size of Duplo blocks, but aren’t Duplo blocks, right?
They’re like a little bit somewhere between normal Lego and Duplo.
Frank
I don’t remember Duplo.
Andy
No, that’s fine.
Frank
So and like I said, I don’t know where my mom got them.
I just know that they’ve been there my whole life.
So
Andy
yeah
Frank
…or at least as long as I can remember.
Andy
Still, it’s a fun project.
Kevin
Yeah.
Andy
I’ve tried printing Legos before and with half success.
I mean, nothing’s going to be good as the old Lego, you know, precision ABS that they do.
Yeah, it’s amazing what Lego’s able, the standards that Lego has.
Chris
Yeah.
Sometimes it’s better and easier just to buy some.
Frank
And they’ve been molding probably since the beginning of Lego rather than printing too.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
Well, like with your point six nozzle, that’s probably too wide for any of the the walls on a regular Lego.
Andy
I think the walls on normal Legos are almost two, no, though, I think there are like one millimeter.
Aren’t they?
Frank
I feel like two millimeters would be too way too big.
Andy
Yeah.
Chris
I do know.
I do know that Lego retires their their molds whenever they they’re just a few of millionths out of tolerance.
I think I think it’s like 50 millionths when they get 50 millionths too worn too big, they retire the mold.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
Makes sense too.
All Legos are interchangeable with all other Legos, or at least they stick to all other Legos.
That’s how you do it.
Andy
Yeah.
Yeah, they’re looking at my son’s Legos and it looks like the some of the smallest walls on these aren’t aren’t necessarily quite that thin.
Chris
Think about it.
Legos are so reliable that you can you can use them as their own measuring stick.
You know?
Andy
Yeah.
Yeah.
Chris
They’re that precise.
Yeah.
Like you kind of see it looks maybe like one and a half millimeters wall thickness on the outside of the Lego.
And then on the inside of the Lego is probably one millimeter.
I don’t have my calipers down here on me to really take a measurement, but but yeah, yeah, everything in here that I think the point six nozzle with print without problems.
I love the point six though.
I don’t think I’m going to go back.
It’s it makes overhangs print, you know, so much more reliable.
It’s a lot quicker compared to running a point four nozzle.
And now with Cura’s Arachne engine, you can keep the same detail with the point six is what you got with the point four.
So for me, it’s kind of like, you know, everything is now now going to be printed with a point six nozzle.
Frank
Well, I may I have been let me put it that way.
I have been playing with the idea, but I bought a bunch of nozzles.
I don’t know what I’d had my printer for two months and I just bought two dozen brass point four nozzles.
So…
Chris
Wow.
Well, it’s working through those.
Just go get a point six drill bit.
Frank
Actually my dad being a machinist, he could probably help me drill them out properly.
Chris
Is it worth your time or no, is it working?
That would be absolutely not doing it on my $50 drill press in my shop that has that much run out on the the chuck more than that on the chuck.
So not going to happen.
Andy
Plus, brass nozzles aren’t exactly expensive.
Frank
No they’re not. That’s part of why I stuck with the brass in their first place is because it’s easier to… once it gets to the point where it needs to be replaced, it’s easier to throw it away than it is to clean it.
Andy
I completely agree, completely agree.
It’s like changing the clutch out on your car.
If you ever pull the transmission, that clutch has got to be in near perfect condition for you to put the same one back without swapping it out.
You know, there’s any reason why that nozzle is coming off unless it’s recently taken off and in near perfect, I’m just going to put in a new one.
Frank
I agree.
Chris
Yep.
Kevin
So you wouldn’t want to get one of those expensive diamond print or nozzles, huh?
Andy
Yeah, really.
Though, I don’t think any of us are printing with any like, what is it, nanocarbon
Frank
carbon fiber?
Andy
Yeah, yeah, carbon fiber stuff.
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s what really tears up nozzles the most in a lot of what we print to the ones with that stuff that’s embedded.
Frank
Yeah.
Actually, I haven’t been concerned about the nozzle getting torn up so much as accidentally cooking filament inside it so that it’s hard and full, you know, half of its ash at that point.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
And that just turns into too much trouble to clean.
Andy
I completely agree.
It is.
I mean, if it’s dirty, it’s easier just to replace it.
Chris
And the best way to avoid that is just not to let your, not to let your print run out.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
Actually the last time that happened wasn’t because the print ran out.
It was because the spool was knotted at the end instead of just stuck into the cardboard spool.
So when it got to the end, the carriage actually broke the spindle that the spool was on trying to pull the plastic down rather than pulling it off.
Chris
Wow.
Andy
Geez.
That says something.
Frank
And it broke it, but not enough to pull the filament through.
And eventually it gave up or broke, but it broke what it was pulling on, but not before the spindle itself broke.
So yeah.
And then it just kept going like it thought it was putting down plastic.
Andy
I think the last time I had baked something in the nozzle is I went reheated, you know, got it preheated up for a print job and then got sidetracked and forgot that I had left it preheating.
And it came back like an hour later just that there had been baking PETG right in the head.
So that was a complete teardown and rebuild.
Frank
And the funny thing is, it’s slow to bake, but once it’s done, you’re just SOL.
Andy
Yeah.
Yeah.
No kidding.
No kidding.
Frank
So we had a topic this week, born of a question of, is it better to replace a project with a print or buy a part?
Does anybody have any thoughts on that?
Chris
Well, we’ve already been talking about that a little bit, you know, with the Legos.
Kevin
I would say that it kind of depends on a number of factors, like is, is the thing you need available to purchase?
How much does that thing cost compared to how much would it cost to print it?
And also, how much time would you spend trying to print it rather than simply buying a replacement?
Frank
Sure.
And along with that would be how much of it is enriching to print it, right?
Right.
I mean, yeah, you can run down to the store and buy the part for 20 bucks, or you can spend five hours designing it and print it off in 20 minutes after that, but you’ve learned something about how to design or you just enjoyed designing it.
Kevin
Sure.
Frank
Me and Andy, you’ve talked about falling down that hole a few times.
Andy
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, I completely agree.
That’s like, sometimes you just get a project that would be fun to sit down and design and have the enjoyment is the design itself versus the actual benefiting from, you know, having a replacement 3D printed items.
Chris
Well, at that point, it’s kind of like watching a movie.
It’s just your personal entertainment value versus.
Andy
Yeah.
Or you got something that’s on that project that you don’t necessarily know how to do yet, and that would be a good project to do to learn that new task, you know?
Frank
Yeah.
We’ve all experienced what the software engineering industry refers to as scope bloat, where you start off on something that’s supposed to be a little project, but leads to this side project and this side project, just so you can do the main project and you step forward a little bit and, you know, side quests all over the place, a 30-minute project turns into a three-day project.
Chris
Like that episode of Malcolm in the Middle, where Bryan Cranston was just trying to replace a light bulb in the kitchen.
Andy
I remember that episode.
Chris
The wife.
The wife.
Andy
Like, to the very end, he’s like working on the car, got the entire engine out or something, and she complains about what I just asked you to change the light bulb and he gets up and says, what do you think I’m doing?
That’s the story of my life right there.
Frank
I’m doing this side project so I can do the main project, which requires that I do this other thing and then this mount and then these other three projects, but I’m almost there.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
Actually, a lot of my custom tools that I have made in my garage for the carpentry stuff were side projects, just so I could achieve one thing, not the least of which was a router table that I could mount to the side of my workbench, just so I could run one piece of molding down the router table.
Andy
That’s good.
Just little things like that just means that you weren’t set up properly in the first place, so that’s just fixing up for just more than just that one project.
Frank
That’s fair.
Andy
Just like when you need that custom weird tool that you just take a bunch of scrap tools and weld them together until you get what you need, well, you didn’t have it when you needed it, so now you do and hopefully it will work for something else down the road in the two hours you spent making the one tool to shave off that 10 minutes that it would have taken to just do it the long way.
Frank
Speaking of amalgamations of tools, Chris, I used the Crescent-Hammer you gave me a while ago as a hammer.
Chris
Nice.
I can’t believe I actually welded that thing together as well as it ended up being.
Frank
Such a beautiful weld job, honestly, but for those who don’t know what I’m talking about, my dad is a machinist using precision tools at work.
One day referred to a Crescent-Hammer, or a Crescent-wrench as a Crescent-Hammer, mostly out of an irony of we use it to hammer on stuff almost as often as we do to loosen or tighten bolts.
He’s not wrong.
Was it for my birthday or for Christmas or something?
Chris
I think it was Christmas.
I think it was Christmas.
Frank
Had welded a ball peen hammer to head to the bottom of a inch and a half Crescent wrench and gave it to me for the holiday.
He’s been sitting in my tool chest now for seven, eight years and I hardly use it, but it was the only ball peen hammer I had.
Andy
Still one of the best gag gifts I could ever do.
Frank
I admire Andy’s gag gifts for you, honestly.
Kevin
I was going to say next, Chris, what you need to do is figure out how to do a wrap of your face around the handle.
Frank
Well, there is a whole strain of additive printing that is basically just a welding rod or not necessarily even a rod, but what’s the other one that has the filament fed through it for welders?
Andy
Like a TIG?
Frank
Yeah, like a TIG welder.
It’s on a mechanized gantry like a 3D printer and does additive that way.
As long as we have already covered the topic of using your printer for things for which it wasn’t designed, it actually was designed for that.
Andy
You just made me think of something here.
If Chris was to make you a tool and put his face on it, the first thing that comes to my mind is electroplating, like the same way that you would go through and etch a circuit board with a laser printer, I wonder if you could accomplish the same thing with electroplating.
If you were to take that toner and put it on a surface so that the electroplating can’t take place in those areas, then you could do multiple tones of electroplating using different metals to come up with your image.
That would be kind of cool.
Too complicated.
Chris
I can put a picture on a piece of wood, but that’s about as far as I go.
Andy
Yeah.
Kevin
Use a wooden handle.
Chris
Yeah.
I could.
Frank
I haven’t gotten into the blacksmithing a whole lot, but I do have the intention eventually to build up my hammers and actually fire up the force that my brother gave me.
When I do that, I may just need to expand my collection of hammers and handles.
Andy
I could see you totally getting into that kind of stuff.
That’s one of the things that Facebook regularly sends me videos on because I get lost in watching them is the people just making the knives and stuff like that from scratch.
That’s a neat talent those people have.
Kevin
When I was a teenager, I swore up and down that I was going to have an anvil and forge it at my house when I grew up.
For my metal working merit badge, we went to Wheeler Farm and did blacksmithing, and it was so much fun.
Chris
I want to blame cartoons that they gave us an unreal expectation of how common anvils actually are.
Frank
You can blame cartoons for a lot of things, but I don’t know, go back 60 years and they were probably a lot more common than they are now.
Andy
Well, it’s just like quicksand.
It’s not something we have to worry about.
I don’t know how many hard hats I wear through the day waiting for one to fall from the sky and hit me in the head.
Frank
Quicksand?
Andy
Anvils.
Frank
Oh.
Chris
Yeah.
I mean, the only anvil, I mean, I have a single anvil and it’s a combination anvil clamp.
Andy
Yeah.
I think I got the same thing too.
Frank
Otherwise called a vice?
Andy
It’s just a little anvil that’s on the vice.
Frank
Otherwise called a… bench vice.
So when my brother created the forge for me, it’s a propane forge with one burner inside it, which I still have to line.
This is how close I am to actually using the damn thing.
And he also took an eight or 10 inch long piece of railroad track and just flattened out in the bottom and put a horn on it.
And that’s my basic anvil.
And I’ve seen that as often as anything.
You watch some of the videos of these people that have actually managed to get a forge going and they’re using a piece of track as often as they’re using anything else.
Andy
It is neat.
Well, I mean, I’m sure there’s a lot of angles and stuff a proper anvil has for metalworking that is important.
But if you’re just playing around or just doing your own thing, I bet a piece of track would be perfect.
Frank
I think the biggest thing that you get with an anvil, actually after it gets bigger, once you get to the 300 pounders or more, is they tend to have the holes for tools.
You’ve got your jig tools that you can put in there and turn, do spirals and that sort of thing.
Rather than hammering it in on the horn, you just get the metal hot and put it in the jig and move it like that.
And the smaller anvils, and especially like the track anvils and that sort of thing wouldn’t necessarily have that kind of hole for it.
But otherwise, you can use any solid piece of steel for the geometry you’re looking for as long as you’ve got the horn and you’ve got some, at least one straight edge.
And ideally a flat surface to do it all on it.
But yeah.
Oh, and don’t use plastic for your anvil.
So don’t print one off and…
Chris
That was exactly my next question.
I was like, you know, I don’t have an anvil, I can actually print one up.
I should do that.
Frank
I have seen where people will 3D print the protective surfaces for their clamps.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
Like when you’re working with wood or something, you don’t want your clamp to press into it or not.
You don’t want your vise to press into it because they’re very aggressive.
Chris
Yeah, same thing with car jacks, jack stands, you know.
And you don’t necessarily want to run to the hardware store, well, it’ll probably be quicker to run to the hardware store, I guess, depending on the emergency.
Kevin
And as we get back into, is it worth it to print it or just buy it?
Frank
But all of our plastics, all of our thermal plastics would be great because they’re being compressed in a situation like that or on the vice or something.
Yeah.
Chris
Well, it’s a…
Frank
And you can probably print it for a hell of a lot less than you can buy it for at the hardware store.
Chris
So you guys might be a little concerned, this is not coming from Andy, but it’s coming from me.
But yeah, use TPU for those in-between kind of things when you’re trying to get a slightly softer rubber.
Andy
Yeah.
Chris
Yeah.
Stuff that the purpose is to avoid damaging mating surfaces.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
Well, we’ve talked about even the possibility of like mallet heads and that sort of thing.
Chris
Yeah.
Frank
3D printed.
Chris
Yeah.
Putting ball bearings in it.
Andy
And I think that would actually work really well, a mallet, making a mallet out of TPU.
I bet that would work good.
Frank
Especially if you…
Well, okay, so Chris has got his mallets that he uses on like brass and that sort of thing, and they’re basically just plastic faces that he’s hammering with.
Your dead stop mallets are just plastic with sand in them.
Chris
Yeah.
So, yeah, actually I have mallets of lots of different materials.
You’ve got wood mallets, you’ve got your rubber mallets, you’ve got your dead stop mallets, and then I’ve got my brass mallet.
And then I think I have a steel mallet, which is basically a hammer, but it’s a big round thing.
It’s not a design, specifically designed head.
So at that point, you just call it a sledgehammer.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
Well, okay, so my dad, the OG DIY guy in my family, as long as you don’t count my grandfather or my great grandfather, my dad took a five-pound sledgehammer that we had been using and he broke the handle on it, and he just kept shortening the handle and putting it back in.
Eventually, it got down to where you’ve got the five-pound sledgehammer with a foot-and-a-half long handle, and he stopped using it as a sledgehammer so much as a regular just hammer.
Andy
Okay.
Frank
Because, you know, at that point it’s not, it doesn’t have the reach to get the concrete unless you don’t care about your back.
So.
Andy
Yeah.
Yeah.
Chris
At what point, at what point do you stop and just grab a rock and bang on something like a monkey, you know?
Frank
Well, and he was finding use for it, so he kept it short and went and bought a new sledgehammer.
Kevin
There you go.
Chris
But if he could have 3D printed a new handle, do you think that would have been worth it?
Frank
I would be concerned about the layer lines…
Kevin
right?
Chris
Yeah.
Frank
And that’s assuming.
Even if you printed it.
I can see 3D printing a handle, like a grip for the handle, but not the handle itself.
Right.
Because it just wouldn’t stand up to the impact stress.
Kevin
I would think if anything, you would 3D print the handle and then use that for lost medium casting.
Frank
There you go.
There’s another idea.
Just because our little hobby printers, number one, they’re not big enough to print a handle that would be long enough to be valuable as a sledgehammer handle or a pick handle or anything like that.
Chris
Yep.
And then at what point is it worth just going down to the store and buying or replacing my handle?
Frank
I would definitely say buy the replacement handle and print a grip for it.
Chris
Yeah.
Because that’s a great thing about printing accessories for your tools is you can customize it to your hand size.
Frank
Well, and not even necessarily that, but you can customize it to the tool set itself.
I’ve got one of those 150 tool sets that I got from Craftsman.
Actually, Andy, you’ve got one very much like it.
I think.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
It was actually the same tool set, but my brother-in-law a couple of years ago decided that I needed to replace my tool set.
So he bought me a DeWalt tool set that is beautiful, but I was using Craftsman and I hadn’t even broken any of the sockets or anything like that.
So I cannibalized the plastic from the case and used it to store in my toolbox and I wasn’t happy with it.
So I ended up purchasing before I got my 3D printer some socket organization stuff and I don’t use half of it because the tool set that I have is half as big as the ones that this thing was designed for, which I didn’t realize when I bought it.
I thought it was just one set of metric and one set of SAE, but it’s like one set of SAE deep sockets for every size you can think of, one set of SAE half inch drive, one set of quarter inch drive, one set of five eighths drive, full sets for all of those for both metric and SAE and it’s like, I don’t have this many tools.
Andy
Yeah.
Kevin
I saw those too.
Chris
That’s another thing I came across though is like I’ve got an older toolbox that I inherited from the wife’s grand folks and it’s a pretty sturdy box.
So of course I’m keeping it, but now it’s a different size than a lot of other toolboxes.
So when I go to buy an organizer for my tools to fit in there, they don’t really fit all that great, you know, or the things that I can get to fit in the drawer and there ends up being like a lot of extra space in the drawer that the organizer doesn’t go to.
So having a 3D printer in this case is great because I can print things custom to the drawer size.
Frank
And the tool set.
Chris
And the tool set.
Instead of just buying some generic thing that it kind of fits, but it doesn’t use up all the space.
Oh, well, I’m one of those.
If there’s space there, I should use it for something.
Andy
Yeah.
Kevin
Right.
Frank
So is it four toolboxes now, or is it still just the three then tool chests, big ones, all the drawers, where I miss remembering.
Chris
So yeah, I’ve got three and I guess it might technically be four because the one has a set on top of it.
So there’s the old one I inherited.
There’s the one I had when I was a mechanic and then there’s the one I put in my basement for all my tools that I use around the house.
Frank
So in other words, you’ve got a ton of storage for your tools and probably still not enough for the tools that you possess.
Chris
Yeah, there are still tools overflowing onto the various shelves in my garage.
Frank
And so organizing to fill every square inch available is probably a good plan for you.
Chris
Yes, very important for the guy with all the tools.
Frank
Wow, that was harder to get around to than I thought it would be when I started.
Andy
That is useful though.
I mean, I’ve seen some of the organizers that you’ve made for your boxes, Frank.
And I’ve had a couple of the little drawer boxes, the little plastic drawers that got broken or whatever, and I’ve wound up printed new drawers all together to fit in there.
And yeah, it’s nice to be able to print whatever organization you want for your tool set, that’s for sure.
Chris
Yep, and that’s worth printing just a single piece or two rather than going down to the store and buying a whole new organizational drawer set because you broke one or two of the drawers.
Andy
Yeah, I completely agree with that one.
Frank
With the, I still haven’t designed an actual tool chest, that might be a better approach than the bench that I was originally doing, the one I talked about last week.
Just design a little mini tool chest that goes underneath my printer or my control module with drawers for what I’m doing rather than using an existing, I called it a toolbox, but it’s an empty spool or a box that a spool came in, so I’m kind of beholden to the size of that box unless I want to cut it down.
So if I just design a tool chest with deep drawers so it fits underneath my control module, that might be better than building around the cardboard box.
And then it’ll be the right size for my printer too.
Andy
That’s not a bad idea.
I’ve got a box of all my printer crap, it’s just a box I throw stuff in, it would be nice to have an actual more organized setup, especially for the tools that you always go back to using and whatnot.
Frank
I agree.
Chris
You guys know those plastic drawer bin things, you know, they’re plastic and they have drawers that’s kind of like a dresser.
Kevin
Yeah.
Frank
Yeah.
Andy
Yeah.
Chris
Yeah, I inherited one of those when the wife was reorganizing her sewing and what have you, and so I’ve been putting all my printer stuff in that.
Andy
Oh, that’s a good idea.
Chris
When I even though I have two, two desks and…
Frank
I’m assuming you still use it, Andy, but I’m what I’ve gotten in mind is, well, excuse me, that’s going to get cut out.
Because when you had a bunch of adults living in the house, you had a toolbox inside the house.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
Grab the mail and then sort it out, depending on who was where, and that’s what I imagine Chris is using for his toolbox.
Chris
Yep.
Just a bigger one.
Frank
Okay.
Andy
It makes sense.
You know, we still use that indoor mail box in the house here, even though it’s just my family now.
We use it to organize all of our mail instead, and some of them still have the names of people that live here.
Phil’s box is our box for our tax information, you know, little things like that gets confusing if we pull the names off of it at this point.
Frank
Positional memory is not enough for you.
Andy
Yeah, there you go.
Frank
Got to blame an old roommate for the bills, and I’m assuming my name is still on the one because I wasn’t gone that much before Phil was.
Andy
Yep, you got your name on one still too.
Frank
As long as it’s not something bad, I’m okay with that.
You can make use of my name, I guess.
Andy
You know, as my friends kind of moved out of my house, they would still occasionally receive mail, and so it made it nice to just leave the names on the interior mail boxes and then, you know, as someone new came in or whatnot, you usually just typed up a new label and put it on the box that receives the least amount of mail on a normal basis.
So it worked.
It’s kind of weird thinking back at how much this house is seen as far as people live in here while I was living here.
Frank
Well, you got to pay the bills somehow.
Andy
Yeah, I couldn’t afford it when I originally bought the damn thing.
Frank
Roommates is the way to do it when you can.
I feel bad for the people that got married at 19 and tried to buy a house.
They didn’t have room to put roommates in.
Andy
Yeah, yeah, it is true.
Frank
That’s a thing though.
So we’re at about an hour, and I feel like we have gone way far afield like we do on the topic.
Kevin
Well, I think we did touch on it toward, I mean, it was kind of…
Chris
It was touch and go all episode.
Kevin
Right as we were talking about all the customizations you can do, I’d say, if you can customize something, then, yeah, go for it, print it.
Frank
Especially when you’re just investing a little bit of time, or, you know, if you’re investing a lot of time even, it might be worth the design phase.
And the cost in plastic is going to be a fraction of what it would take to go to the store and buy the thing.
So I guess it’s a matter of imminent need.
Do I need this in five minutes, or can it wait a day or two while I figure it out?
Andy
You talk about the cost of plastic being cheap, and it is.
It’s really cheap to print stuff.
But do you guys go through the same kind of panic I do when you think about how much money you’ve spent on reels of plastic?
Kevin
Yes.
Frank
No.
I try not to think about it personally.
I have a lot more in the way of plastic toys in my office than I ever would have before I got the printer.
And they’re all toys.
Some of them are statues, most of them are toys, or, you know, just the odd curiosity that I designed to see if I could, or the odd, you know, Batman mask.
Kevin
And some of it, you know, sometimes I look at it and see that they’re like, hey, yeah, you can buy PLA at 10 a kilogram if you buy 10 all at once. And I’m like, that’s a really good price per kilogram, but can I really drop10akilogramifyoubuy10allatonce.AndI′mlike,that′sareallygoodpriceperkilogram,butcanIreallydrop100 on it?
Frank
In one go?
I will admit, I usually pay closer to 25 or25or30 a kilogram.
And I’ll buy probably one or two a month, depending on how big my prints are.
When I was doing the table prints, I actually went through a spool and a half for the fittings.
And that stacks up real quick.
But if I’m just doing small prints, they, I say two a month is probably more like four a month two each paycheck.
Anyway, the point is, I can spend 60 on plastic that I use to print with and probably 10 or 15% of it ends up a scrap, or I can spend60onplasticthatIusetoprintwithandprobably10or1530 at whatever vendor to buy this part that I need every two or three months and not have the fun of having my 3D printer.
So it’s, there’s that balance scale.
I enjoy using the printer.
So I designed for it and could I buy, or could I spend less money on the plastic parts as I need them?
Absolutely.
But I wouldn’t have all the extra stuff that I can design or just enjoy printing in the meantime.
Andy
Yeah.
I think you’re right on that one.
Frank
What else would I do with my free time video games?
Read.
Oh geez.
I could read so much more if I wasn’t designing stuff on my printer.
Andy
What time?
Free time?
I’ve never heard of that.
Frank
Yeah.
Well, we don’t have kids.
So…
Chris
yeah
Frank
my, my not printing time is actual free time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Chris
Yeah. Stop rubbing it in!
Kevin
Although going back to the cost of supplies, when I first got the resin printer, I was reading stuff about, well, yeah, resin is more expensive than FDM, blah, blah, blah.
I don’t necessarily think that’s true because like Frank said, he’ll spend 25 for a kilogram spool of, of filament, I mean, when I buy resin, it’s25forakilogramspoolof,offilament,Imean,whenIbuyresin,it′s14 to $25 for a kilogram of standard resin, depending on sales and stuff.
Andy
Okay.
That’s not too, that’s not too different.
Kevin
No, it’s pretty close to the same price.
Frank
And a near requirement that after your print is supports changes.
Kevin
I mean, there’s that.
Frank
The cost a little bit.
Kevin
There is that.
Frank
Well, okay, so like a couple of years ago, Andy, you might remember this.
I was tracking the fuel that I put into my car for a year and the miles that I got out of it.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
And interestingly, the high octane per mile was about the same as the low octane per mile.
For my little, it was a four cylinder Focus.
And for that little car, at least, there was no cost difference per mile or a negligible cost difference and the higher octane was better for the engine.
So I just was putting high octane fuel in my car and it burned cleaner.
So it was better for the environment too and all that stuff.
So I imagine that the reason it comes to mind is because with resin and thermoplastic being so similar in price, it makes sense that it would be just a matter of where do you prefer to use it?
Do you require resolution or do you require strength or variety in material or whatever?
Right?
Chris
Okay.
Yeah.
Frank
Or do you want to do big things or are you only going to do small things?
Kevin
Yeah.
Frank
All right.
Let’s wrap this up and we’ll let everyone go do stuff.
We’d like to thank everyone for listening to the very end.
The very, very end.
If you like what you hear, please give us all the stars and subscribe.
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You can find us in our Facebook group, Amateur 3D Pod, or you can email us at panelists at amateur3dpod.com.
Our individual feedback email addresses are Franklin, Kevin, Andy, or Chris at amateur3dpod.com.
The music in this episode was written by Kevin Buckner.
Open AI’s whisper completed the heavy lifting for the transcripts, which you can find linked into the description.
Our panelists are me, Franklin Christensen, and my friends, Kevin Buckner, Chris Weber, and Andy Cottam.
And until next time, we’re going offline.
Kevin
Keep your FEP tight.
Chris
Cue the end of the episode plug.
Andy
Print everything.
Andy
Sorry, I didn’t talk nearly this much this time.
My brain just wasn’t in the game.
Kevin
It’s fine.
Chris
Craig’s still on and Frank is not.