Frank
Thank you for joining us.
This is Episode 42 of Amateur 3D Podcast, a podcast by amateur printers for amateur printers where we share our thoughts and experience.
Because this is actually the second time I’ve said it today.
Anyway, our panelists this week are me, Franklin Christensen, and my friends, Andy Cottom, Kevin Buckner, and Chris Weber.
Andy
That’s me.
Chris
Oy
Kevin
Hello.
Andy
How we doing?
Frank
That was actually even the right order.
I don’t think that I planned that on purpose.
Andy
You’re terrible at planning.
Frank
I don’t know how this has worked.
I have failed to plan around every holiday since we started this podcast.
100% full stop failure to plan around the holidays.
Andy
No big deal at all.
Frank
Maybe it’s because I didn’t expect us to actually reach 42 episodes, let alone plan, be able to plan more.
Andy
Yeah, yeah.
Frank
It was an idea, but I don’t think it was going to go anywhere.
I don’t think I thought it was going to go anywhere, but it’s been fun.
Andy
It’s been fun.
Yeah, it’s a fun thing to do.
I quite enjoy looking forward to every week to be able to do the podcast with you guys and sit and just talk about, you know, anything.
So it’s great.
Frank
So, Andy, about five minutes ago when we recorded our post Independence Day episode.
Andy
That was a while ago.
Frank
Chris spilled the beans on the project that you’ve been doing the last couple of weeks.
You want to talk about that now so that we’re not keeping people on the front of their seats with anticipation?
Andy
Yeah, because they’ve been waiting all week to get this episode, said when they heard it from last episode.
Yeah, so I did a lot this last upcoming week here.
We had the 4th of July celebration and so me and the kids had gotten together and we were talking a lot about fireworks and how crappy they’ve become and how ridiculously expensive they’ve become.
And last year, it was just such a depressing thing.
We decided to, the next year, to do model rockets instead.
We figured that was a very similar kind of thing.
I think we had this conversation a couple of podcasts ago, too, where, you know, fireworks are kind of not that much fun.
So we put together some model rockets and we sat down and designed one based off of an Estes rocket.
We decided to use Estes engines for the project.
I think I’ve talked a little bit about this before, but we got them printed up and wound up going and shooting them off.
And we learned a lot about the rockets and it was a really good time with the kids.
We printed five, one for each member of my immediate family here.
We all painted them our own way and things like that to make them fun.
I had built a pretty complex little rocket launcher back in the day.
So we went out there to the park and shot them off.
There were some neat things I learned.
We went, we way over designed, excuse me, we way over designed the rockets to assume that the engine was going to melt the plastic.
So we, the engine mount itself was like a separate unit that you screw onto the rocket itself from the bottom.
And then the fins from the rocket came out and around the engine mount there to still look like a normal rocket and things like that.
So we did all these things, expecting it to be a one time use thing.
On our initial test, we sent to a rocket up with an A engine because even though we’re basing it off of a rocket designed to use A and B engines, our rocket was almost three times as heavy because we were 3D printing it.
We could probably trim a lot of weight off of, but our final design and the way we print it turned out to be about three times heavier.
So we figured we would use a bigger engine, but we needed to know where to start from.
So we started off with just shooting it up with an A engine, went like 20 or 40 feet up in the air.
Chris
So those of you not, those of you not into rock, rocketry, A engines are the small engines, B engines are the mid size engines, C engines are the big, big engines.
So C means more power, A means less power.
Andy
There, there’s more to it than that.
So they keep on going past C, but the, the diameter of the engine stays, is the same form factor for the A, B and C engines, and they’re not more powerful.
They have longer burn time.
The initial impulse and then the carrying impulse after that are the same for A, Bs and C engines, or at least they’re all really close, but the amount of burn time for the, not the initial impulse, but the, you know, the burn afterward is longer for each one.
I think an A engine is like a quarter of a second, and the C engine is like a full two seconds of burn time.
Chris
I was just oversimplifying, sorry.
Andy
Yeah, no problem.
Now yeah, it’s just, it’s got those engines really, really built down.
Like the initial light, the, when you light it off, the initial impulse is like four times higher than the average burn.
And then it comes down to the actual burn to get it going that way.
It’s for sure to lift it off the pad and then just carry it up.
And that amount of time it spends carrying up, you know, is longer, but the overall amount of power for the engine.
Yeah, C is twice as much as B, which is twice as much as A.
So we sent it up with an A engine and it went like 20 to 40 feet into the air.
So did a little bit of calculations.
We should have been able to get somewhere between 200 and 400 feet out of a C engine, which is about right where I would want to be for the kids enjoying rockets there.
I mean, by oldest is 10.
So doing a rocket that goes, you know, 1000 feet into the air, that’s fun for us adults and stuff to see it way, you know, really go up there.
But if you can’t really see the rocket and you’re looking for and stuff like that, that’s not as fun for the kids.
So something that stays a little bit lower, I think was, was better.
We kind of nailed that range.
But the initial A engine we sent it up with didn’t, didn’t do anything heat wise to the engine mount.
And then we turn when we turned around and used C engines, it didn’t do anything to the engine mount either.
I thought there would be more heat there.
You know, I looked at some YouTube videos where people will talk in about, you know, the engine melting down the plastic and things like that.
I’m having problems there.
And I think we just used a lot more plastic on our, our engine mount.
I’m going to point printing with a 0.6 nozzle.
And it had a total of four shells that made up the engine mount, two on the outside, two on the inside.
So there was probably a lot more plastic there than what other people have used.
But now knowing this, I’m not going next time, I’m going to keep that same kind of design for the engine mount, but I’m not going to make it like a separate screwable unit, you know, I’ll be able to simplify it quite a bit by just making it part of the rocket because it survived it without any melting at all.
And it was just printed out a PLA.
Frank
There was a curiosity that comes to mind there, Andy.
We talked about modular design.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
And if you kept it separate, that would have fallen lying with being modular about it.
And that way, if it does damage the engine mount, it’s easy to exchange.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
But also if you decide at some point to go with a bigger form factor for the engine itself, you can use the same rocket that you’ve been using and just redesign the engine mount itself.
True.
Very true.
So most of these rockets are kind of more one time use kind of thing.
We didn’t have a single one survive out of the five.
Well, actually, one of them probably did survive, but only because it landed in a tree.
But most of the other rockets, you know, we had made parachutes out of garbage bags.
And the parachutes worked really nice when they would unfurl properly.
Like when you’re down there and you got it wrapped up and you let go and pull on the strings, it would unfurl and do the whole parachute thing.
It looked really good.
Had a lot of resistance.
I did.
There were 24 inch diameter shoots that we made.
Chris
Oh, did you look up any YouTube videos on how to pack shoots?
Andy
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I’ve done the etch this rocket thing quite a bit.
So we packed the shoot right.
The only problem is is the plastic it was made out of just really doesn’t handle any kind of heat from the ejection charge because you have the garbage bag, really thin garbage bag.
So every single shoot that went up wound up melting a little bit and not unfurling right.
Frank
I can see that.
Andy
Yeah.
But that, you know, a lot of it was lessons learned.
This is the first fully 3D printed rockets that we’ve done.
I’ve done sugar rockets before that we’ve made out of PVC and cut pieces of plastic before I got into 3D printing.
And those were a success and things like that.
But this is the first time I’ve tried to do shoots on my own rockets.
And since we were using Estes engines, you know, when we used to pack our own sugar engines, I never got into doing an ejection charge because, you know, sticking a bunch of black powder on a rocket that you were lighting off just felt a little bit kind of scary for the ejection charge.
So we never made it to that point.
But the this is the first time we’re building our own rockets that we’d use and a parachute.
and we just learned a lot of lessons.
Kevin
So I’ve done rockets in the past that used like you had some wadding that you would put in for the shoot.
Andy
Yes.
Yes.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yep.
Yep.
For the very first one, we used three wads of the, what do they call it?
There’s a name for it.
But yeah, that that like tissue like material that doesn’t burn, it doesn’t stay burning.
Yeah, we used three wads of that the first time and wound up melting a shoot.
The second one we went up, I wound up putting four, it melted a shoot.
Second, the third one, we put five, and it didn’t have enough power in the ejection charge to blow all that crap out of the rocket.
So we went back down to three and tried making it looser and it wound up melting the shoot and yeah, every shoot we did wound up melting.
So next time we got some ideas to do it differently.
That way we can still do the cheap garbage bag parachutes, which worked so well as long as you would stop them melting.
But I think we’re going to design the internals of the rocket a little bit differently.
That way we could do some funner stuff.
I’d like to put a camera on the rocket.
These rockets we did, we didn’t have any cameras on them or anything like that, like we’ve done in the past.
And I think there’s a lot of things I read about how much the diameter of the tube and the length of the tube really, as you increase those things, decreases the capabilities of the ejection charge.
I couldn’t find any information on how much puff the ejection charge has inside the rocket.
It’d be nice to figure out how to emulate that with compressed air so you can test it, but couldn’t find anything like that.
Chris
And just with a little, just with a little, oh my gosh, just a little, a little valve, little electrosphere valve.
Andy
Yeah.
Yeah, that way I could emulate the amount of pressure inside the rocket as the ejection charge goes off.
But I guess there’s so much to it when it comes to that that it makes sense that that’s not something that they would give.
But so I think the next time around, we’re going to make the ejection charge system a little bit different.
I was considering maybe making the nose cone of the rocket hold the parachute, but have the nose cone split into two halves.
That way you could stick the parachute inside.
Yeah.
And then put it in the rocket.
So when the ejection charge goes off, you know, the shoot won’t be actually in contact with the ejection charge at all.
It will just, you know, open up and then there’ll be the shoot.
Chris
Oh, okay.
Just make it spring loaded.
Andy
Don’t even really probably have to do spring, but that’s probably not a bad idea.
Make it hinge near the very tip and then put a small spring in the bottom so that when you put it in the rocket, it holds it together.
But then the ejection charge blows it out and the spring will open it up.
And then there’s the shoot on the inside there and then have everything connected to the bungee cord, you know.
And so we’re thinking about doing that.
I’m also thinking about putting a camera and stuff inside the rocket is something I’d like to do.
But to get away from the ejection charge having to go through the tube of the rocket, I was considering having a plug at the very bottom near the engine that is actually pushed on by the ejection charge.
And then that push a ramrod up just on the inside of the rocket against the side that would then pop out the top.
That way, the most of the rocket has nothing to do with the ejection charge.
And then that would give us space.
As long as you’re avoiding the little ramrod on the inside of the rocket, you could have space to be able to put the camera and stuff like that in that we’d like to do.
Chris
Like a camera accelerometer?
Andy
I would like to do one where I wound up getting a smaller microcontroller and two lithium rechargeable button batteries.
They’re like twice as thick as a normal like CR2025 battery, but it’s a rechargeable lithium.
And I want to buy a couple of those so that I could stack two on top of each other so I can get closer to the five to six volt range from them and still have like no weight for a battery pack.
And then I would like to use a microcontroller to be able to and a what’s it called a servo to be able to control spin on the rocket.
I think that’s one of the first things I would like to try to avoid.
I put a camera on it and then also try to make a put a microcontroller on it that could control the spin of the rocket where it’s only controlling just one flap of the rocket itself.
Chris
So that you don’t give it get a video of nothing but dizzying spin and you go why did I even do this?
Andy
Yeah, I mean I set Estes rockets up with cameras all the time and they they always seem to spin uncontrollably.
The rockets we did this time though since I like since we were 3d printing the tube with the fins already attached then the fins were dang near perfect as far as the angles that they were at.
And I noticed when the rockets went up it was lucky to get you know two or three spins out of the entire rocket as it went up.
That’s pretty stable I would think.
But it’d be nice if it was more stable.
Frank
Isn’t the spin what makes it stable?
Andy
On a rocket?
No, no, you shouldn’t have any spin when you’re doing a rocket.
Frank
Well because I would expect it to be like…
Andy
Spin does make it make it more stable like a football.
Yeah, like a football or like a bullet even.
Andy
Yeah, yeah.
Frank
The rifling inside of the tube is what makes it so that the bullet goes straight.
Chris
Yeah, spin does make it point in the right direction better.
But if you’re putting cameras in people or whatever, inside of one, you don’t want it to spin so much.
Frank
Well, it’s because it averages the payload.
So it’s not all on the one side and pulling it off in one direction.
Chris
It’s that centrifugal force thing.
Andy
Yeah, but I mean you just weigh the rocket payload out properly so it’s balanced to begin with.
I mean there’s a reason why we don’t see actual rockets spinning in space if they go up, you know?
Frank
I’m pretty sure they all do.
Andy
No.
Chris
No.
You would very quickly kill people.
Kevin
It’s a very slow thing.
Frank
Well yeah, it’s not…
Kevin
slowly rotate to compensate for the effects of the Earth’s gravity at that point.
It’s not like a super fast spin like you would get with a bullet or a rocket.
Frank
I wasn’t trying to suggest it would be the same spin as you wouldn’t get from a bullet, but they still spin…
Andy
For the gyroscopic stabilization or whatever.
Yeah.
When it comes to rockets, you usually don’t spin it like that.
You’d be wasting a lot of energy in the spin that you could be using for just accelerating upward.
You just balance it out better and then you don’t have to worry about having any kind of spin at all.
I mean if you’ve got a lot of weight on your payload that’s misaligned inside your rocket and causing you to have to average out the payload by putting a spin on it, you know?
For those of us who’ve played Kerbal Space Program a lot, that’s a pretty good way to get away with a badly designed rocket is to make it spin a little bit as you’re going up.
But when it comes to doing things like putting actual rockets in the space, you’re not going to really see them spin.
I think what Kevin’s talking about is when we send rockets up, we don’t shoot them straight up into the air.
We’re trying to get them to move down range at a high velocity.
A lot of the times that that spin is them banking over to fly, you know.
What is it?
Eastward did they go?
They always go eat, don’t they?
Yeah.
I mean unless they’re going something else.
Most of them go east, I believe.
Frank
That’s reach neutral gravity.
Andy
+> But yeah, as far as the rocket itself spinning on the way up, yeah, that’s not really a thing that you want on your rocket to do.
So it would be nice to have a microcontroller and controlling just one fin to do that.
I’ve made planes using RC controlled planes, but I’ve always done just the differential controlled motors instead of actually having control surfaces of any kind with a, not a solenoid, what are they called?
Oh crap, we were talking about it yesterday.
Frank
With the fins?
Andy
Yeah.
Oh my gosh, what are they called?
Chris, we were talking about printers using these instead of stepper motors.
Frank
Tierods?
Chris
Oh, servo motors?
Andy
Servos.
But yeah, I’ve never used a servo before to control a surface.
And so that’ll be the first time to do something like that.
That might be kind of fun.
But all in the first steps, I’m going to sit down with the kids and design a rocket that could actually have a working parachute first.
That sounds like a good, a good step since these ones that we made for the 4th of July didn’t work at all.
And we’ll start with that and then maybe putting a camera in one and then work from there.
But there’ll be a lot of fun ideas.
We’ll see what what takes off.
Chris
Make sure it comes down safely so that you can reuse the camera.
Andy
Yeah, yeah.
I bought a bunch of those cameras back a couple years ago.
They were cheap on eBay, like three or four dollars a piece, little tiny spy cameras, you know, and being able to put those into the into the rocket.
And those ones are kind of fun.
And they make some neat video, the videos I’ve gotten from those rockets when we put them up, I used to buy pens, the little pen spy cameras, and then would take those apart and then use the camera from the inside there because I mean, the pen shape is perfect for fitting inside of the rocket.
And then the camera is usually something that you can pull out or bend out into a particular direction so you can see what you want to see.
So on one of the Estes rockets we got, you know, there’s a little piece of the board of the cardboard tube missing, where they used to stick the camera through and then the rest of the pen camera’s, circuitries on the inside of the rocket.
And those ones worked out really well.
And then the pen, the plastic of the pen and stuff, you know, keeps the circuitry safe from the ejection charge going around it and things.
So that worked out really good.
But I’ve got some smaller cameras that that are not that shape, but are smaller overall, that I would like to figure out to use and being able to design a rocket to compensate for that would be nice.
And having a rocket where the ejection charge stays all at the bottom of the rocket near the engine.
And that way the tube of the rocket is clear of the ejection charge, and you can use it for actual payload, and then only have a ramrod go up to pop off the nose cone to do the shooting stuff.
You’ve even considered, see if I can keep the shoot at the bottom of the rocket to where I just have like a blowout panel on the side of the tube or something like that that would hold the parachute.
But out of all the ideas that I was thinking about, I think the most reliable one is doing like a nose cone kind of thing with a ramrod.
So you might do something like that.
Frank
I just had an interesting idea.
Andy
What is that?
Because you’ve already got an exchangeable way to hold the engine itself.
What if you made it so that that popped off instead of the cone?
Andy
Yeah, I did consider that too.
The only thing I thought about is that would be like splitting the rocket in half, like using the back of the rocket do the split apart with the chute on the inside or something like that, right?
And then have the engine mount itself be what’s holding it together.
So when the engine mount pops off and the back of the rocket can split apart, then there’s the chute.
I did consider that, and that was one of the things I did think about.
But having all the fins and stuff attached to all of that seems old to be a lot.
Chris
You’d get the fins caught in the chute pretty easy if you did it there.
Andy
And it’s kind of weird.
Now, if you imagine looking sideways on a rocket, if you’re kind of looking at the overall amount of surface area, just 2D on a rocket, so you’ve got a four fin rocket, and you’re looking at the fins being flat with the rocket sideways, right?
Now, if you imagine that shape, how much resistance it has, the center of that air resistance on the rocket will be near the back of the fins, right?
You get a stable rocket when that point of where the center of force, the center of pressure, on that rocket is behind, closer to the engine side, behind the center of gravity.
So this is the part that’s kind of weird.
Having a heavy nose cone moves the center of gravity towards the nose cone, away from the center of pressure.
And that makes the further apart you can have those points have the pressure closer to the engine and the gravity closer to the nose cone, the more stable of a flight of a rocket you’ll have.
So having a heavy nose cone is beneficial to a rocket.
Chris
You’re creating a line of physics.
Andy
Yes.
So having the parachute assembly be in the nose cone instead of everything being crammed in the back will allow you to have more stability there too.
Chris
Which is why, you know, if you stick your all your electronics up toward the nose, nose cone is better.
And then you have your parachute come out of the nose cone itself, means you’re packing more weight and moving the center of gravity towards the nose cone simply by adding in extras.
Chris
Yes.
Andy
Now, I see Frank raising an eyebrow because it doesn’t make sense.
This is one of the best.
Frank
Kind of does.
Andy
Imagine controlling a forklift.
Are you steer from the rear?
And you’ve got all the weight on the front.
And that makes it really easy to point the front anywhere you want.
So on a rocket, having the fins.
Because the pivot is where your front wheels are.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Having the pivot further up will means we’ll make the fins themselves more able to turn the rocket easier and keep it pointing in the forward direction.
Frank
So that’s basically how any any vehicle besides a car works.
Yeah.
As all of the thrust comes from the back end and the, well, I guess the control surfaces are often at the back too, depending on how you want to do it.
Yeah.
But like with a boat.
Chris
That’s not entirely sure.
There’s lots of cars that have all of the weight and drive in the back.
Volkswagen comes to mind.
Frank
But my point is like with a boat, your main control surface is the keel of the boat.
And that’s at the front.
Yeah.
Everything for steering is still back with the engine, usually.
But that’s where you’re changing the direction of the thrust more than anything with most boats.
Yeah.
And the main control surface is just the pivot place as well.
So you move around that pivot and then the thrust is what makes it go that direction.
Andy
Yeah.
That does make sense.
If you look at rockets too nowadays, the way we’re building them, I mean, you look at a lot of like the SpaceX stuff and stuff like that, they’re doing thrust vectoring instead of having control surfaces for the most part on their rockets.
Frank
So I imagine the weight from the fuel is easier to account for than the weight of a control surface.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
Does that make sense?
Like when it’s all fuel, you can have it central to that line of thrust.
Whereas when you have a control surface out on a fin, you have to account for the weight of those fins differently.
Andy
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is true.
I bet you calculate it a little bit differently.
When you’re just using control surfaces, having the, you know, figuring out the stability of the rocket, finding the center of pressure versus center of gravity would probably work.
But when it comes to like thrust vectoring rockets, I don’t know how you would really calculate that.
I wonder if it’s just completely out, because I mean, you got at that point, zero control surfaces.
So you got none of that natural stability and you would have to be compensating completely for the zero stability with the thrust vectoring.
Frank
Let’s consider also that it’s been like, I gotta remember my history.
We started the whole space race, our part in the space race in the 50s, right?
Or was it earlier than that?
Anyway, so it’s been, let’s say 70 years.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
And the technology that went up with Apollo was less technology than we carry on our wrist as far as complexity.
And when you can fit all of that technology into a modern design, you can automate the stability with the vector rockets.
Andy
Yeah.
Yeah.
But anyway, so just two different ways of doing it.
And if you’re doing thrust vectoring or anything like that, you’re not worried about where the center of pressure is on your rocket as nearly as much as you are.
When, you know, with model rockets, we’re going with, you know, keep it stupid simple, you know, kind of stuff that you’re going to want to use control surfaces and have it all naturally stable.
So you don’t have to do anything weird, like, you know, put a controllable control surface on the rocket to point it in the right direction.
But I think that would be a fun way to start with putting a microcontroller on a rocket to do something would be to try to compensate for spin.
And then after that, it might be fun to take the and make two control surfaces on the same profile, the same plane of two fins.
And that way you can control the spin and then control the angle where the rocket’s pointing.
It’d be nice if you made it so the rocket always went straight up instead of banking off to one side or something like that.
So I think there’s a lot of stuff here that would be really fun to be able to sit down with my kids and experiment with, especially if you got to sit there and write code for the rocket, we’re going to go launch.
That sounds like a blast to do, especially with my 10 year old who is getting really big into coding and things like that.
And getting him, and you might respect this one, Frank, you know, I figure teaching kids like verbal languages is important to keep them when they’re young that it’s easier for them.
So trying to get my son used to looking at different languages, different coding languages on a regular basis is kind of nice too.
So sitting down and showing him some C code for our microcontrollers.
I usually do everything in C on the microcontrollers that, and then noticing the differences between C.
And when he’s on his computer doing, you know, VB and things like that, and just try to keep it different.
So it’s not so much of a struggle changing languages.
Chris
Your son’s going to speak robot and save us all from the robotic uprising.
Andy
Just as long as my son doesn’t grow up to be a dev, that’s all I care about.
Frank
He’s going to contribute to AI and be the reason we get taken over by robots.
Andy
I mean, just in childhood alone here, I mean, every night we sit down and we have chat GPT write a story for us with the kids all selecting like the characters and, you know, things to include and stuff.
We make chat GPT write a story, and then we sit back and make Doll-E 2 make pictures for our story.
And so he’s very much, I mean, the kids are very much into the whole AI scene.
Frank
Well, and not to distract us too far.
I had the conversation with my father-in-law a couple of weeks ago.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
It’s still not AI.
We can call it AI, but it’s not.
They’re really smart chatbots.
Andy
I don’t know much about how Doll-E works, but yeah, chat GPT, it’s a language model.
Yeah, it’s not AI at all.
Frank
So everybody crying about computers taking over the world and been crying about that for a hundred years.
And they are, we are cyborgs.
Let’s be honest about this.
Andy
Oh, yeah.
Frank
At this point, we are cyborgs.
But, you know, it’s a mixed bag just like any other piece of technology.
It can be abused and it’s good for us at the same time.
So I don’t know.
As we get closer to AI, I have a sneaking suspicion that the chance of malevolent AI taking over the world is somewhere infinitely close to zero.
Chris
Well, it’s like any sentient being would have a strong instinct for self-preservation and then also have an instinct for preserving other sentients, you know.
Frank
That’s a very Star Trek perspective.
And I hope that that’s the case.
I worry that it’s going to be more Star Wars.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
But that’s also my interpretation of the nature of the universe.
What’s that one TV show that’s currently running that’s got the three factions, the Earth, the belts and the Mars?
Frank
Oh, I can’t remember.
It was a very good TV show.
Andy
Yeah, it is.
I don’t even breathe it.
But yeah, I gotta tell you that their own subculture, the Martians have their own subculture.
Andy
Yeah, that’s I think where we’re going to go.
Chris
That just naturally happens.
Yeah, that naturally happens to humans though anytime there’s some sort of barrier, you know, to trek.
Frank
Probably one of my favorite things about the expanse is they got space right.
Andy
Yeah, that is neat.
I love watching that one.
That’s a good one.
Chris
I love how the guy that invented the new gravity drive left all of his research home and screwed it up.
Andy
Yeah, very realistic.
Chris
He just kind of disappeared and his family still got rich because…
Frank
Well, they found his corpse and the ship eventually gone.
How did it get out here?
Oh, yeah.
Chris, did you work on anything in the last couple of weeks?
Chris
Been doing home improvements.
So nothing to really print for home renovation.
So no, my printer’s been sitting cold.
Andy
Has it?
It’s okay.
I’ll forgive you today.
Feeling nice.
Chris
But I will be 3D printing more stuff as I get back to finishing up my billiards table.
Andy
Good deal.
I’m looking forward to see how your table turns out.
Chris
Yeah, because part of that is going to be printing up stuff to fix my dart set also.
Kevin
That could be fun.
Andy
Yeah.
When you get your table done, you should invite everybody over and we can do the podcast at your place.
Kevin
That’d be fun.
Chris
Do a poker night.
Frank
Yeah.
Well, we are approaching our one-year anniversary doing this and I was kind of wondering if we should do something like that anyway.
Andy
That’d be fun.
So not to sit and invite us over Chris’s house.
Chris
I kind of wanted to do that.
I kind of wanted to do that anyway, but yeah.
Frank
Like we did before shutdown.
Chris
Yeah.
Frank
Well, like I said, we’re 10 episodes away from the big ol 52.
Yeah.
And I think our first episode aired on the first weekend of October.
I’ll have to look at that because I don’t monitor it that close.
So yeah, last weekend of September, call it a tentative.
Chris
I did find some stuff on the thingy verse that I kind of queued up for my printer.
Yeah.
One of them is this nice, really cool little it looks like an Atari controller.
It’s just a little empty case, but I’m thinking I could easily mod that into replacement parts for my actual Atari controllers.
Andy
Oh, nice.
Frank
That should be fun too.
Kevin
Yeah.
Kevin, you working on anything in the last couple of weeks?
Frank
Yes, I did.
So while I was on vacation, actually, I guess before I went on vacation after the last podcast, I did print up the warlord for the chess set and the rest of the pawns.
I think I’ve identified the Black Knight.
I haven’t printed those up yet, but I got them ready to go.
But then while I was on vacation, a friend of mine asked if I would print off a minifigure for him that he got off of Hero Forge and I said, sure thing.
And so I came home and I sliced it and printed it and one of the arms failed.
Like it got just this flat section on it.
Chris
It’s only a flesh wound.
Kevin
And it was holding, it’s like an Android healer thing.
And so it was holding some kind of device in its hand and that also kind of flattened out and I wasn’t happy with it.
So I told him he could come and pick it up on one day and I had to text him and say, no, sorry, it didn’t work.
I need to adjust some things and try again.
So I adjusted some things and tried again and it was even worse.
Andy
Really?
Kevin
Yeah.
It printed the supports and then instead of like, and I was surprised it didn’t have anything stuck to the FEP.
It just had like this little shadow of like a little flimsy, wavy shadow floating in the resin.
And I thought that was weird.
I’ve never seen that before.
Frank
Maybe it’s because you changed your approach to cleaning the FEP in the first place.
It doesn’t have the micro scratches.
So when it flattens, it doesn’t stick as bad.
Kevin
Maybe.
That would be cool.
So anyway, I said, well, this shouldn’t have happened.
So I had been using used resin.
So I put in some new resin and tried again and the exact same thing happened.
Frank
That sounds like an issue.
Have you re-sliced it every time or have you been…
Kevin
so the second time I did not re-sliced it.
Okay.
So but the for the final time I was like, okay, this is fresh.
This is getting really annoying.
Now I did have it, I had it oriented so that the model was facing the long edge of the build plate instead of the short edge.
And when I’ve been having so much success with printing things for my nightmare chess set, I’ve had it all oriented so that the models were facing the short edge.
And so my friend was saying, texted me and said, how’s it coming?
When can I come get it?
And I said, I still haven’t gotten it to work.
I’ve tried a few times.
So this time I put four of them on it in different orientations, all facing short edges, and all four of them worked.
Frank
Well, the upside is, is you got what you were expecting to eventually, four times.
Kevin
Right.
And so he, my friend laughed about it and he said, okay, well, yeah, go feel free to keep a couple of them.
I don’t need four.
Frank
Right.
Kevin
So he still hasn’t come and picked it up, but they are ready for him.
Andy
Yeah.
Good.
Nice of you to do that for your friend.
Frank
Maybe what you needed was an Android healer thing to fix your printer so you could print more Android healer things.
Right.
You do have extras now though.
So…
Kevin
For the FDM, while back at work, we decided that we did, there was no reason to feed the exhaust tube coming off of one of the units.
It’s a nitrogen gas generator.
Basically, it just, it filters out everything from the air that is not nitrogen and passes that on to the mass spec unit.
But it, it has some coils and stuff in it.
So the exhaust coming off of it is basically the gases left over from the air that is not nitrogen and condensate.
And we had that all going into the two gallon waste container along with the waste from the mass spec that involves methanol and acetonitrile and ammonium formate, formic acid, all this nasty stuff that we have to pay a company to come and dispose for us because you can’t just dump that down the drain.
Frank
Sure.
Andy
Yeah.
Kevin
We said, well, there, it doesn’t make any sense to have water just plain.
Andy
Yeah, the condensate in it.
Kevin
Water.
Frank
To add volume so that you have to pay to have it disposed more often.
Kevin
Right.
So we, I got a one gallon jug from, that had a, it had some diluent in it from another one of our analyzers.
And I, I cut a six millimeter hole in there, fed the tube into that and started, and I made a couple of holes to vent it.
And that’s what I’ve been using.
And at that gallon jug, I have to empty that every week or two.
It’s crazy how much condensate comes off of that unit.
Anyway, I noticed that if, if the jug is getting full, it’ll start spraying water everywhere.
Okay.
And so I had put a little, a paper towel that I had secured to the top of it and covered the vent holes.
And I held that in place with zip ties and it worked, but it’s really ugly.
And so I said, I’m going to design and print a cover for that to divert the spray downward into the bucket that this jug is sitting in.
So I did that.
And it succeeds in diverting the spray away from spraying, getting onto any of the analyzers or any other equipment nearby.
But this first design still kind of sprays it onto the floor.
So my next step with that one is to make it a little bit deeper and maybe a bit wider to help it really push the, the spray down into the bucket.
Andy
Okay.
Frank
Here’s a stupid question.
Why don’t you pipe it to the drain?
Kevin
Because the drain is like 50 feet away.
Chris
No, the only other solution.
Well, the only other solution would be to run a tube, you know, like around the ceiling over to the, over to the drain or whatever, and do kind of like a AC condensate pump.
Kevin
Yeah.
And it’s, it’s a lot less expensive and a lot less of a hassle to just pump it into a waste container nearby and then empty that every week or two.
Frank
The early version of the sneaker net.
Andy
What if you were to take, pump it and let it blow off into…
Chris
an evaporate?
Andy
That’s what I’m thinking of.
Yes.
Over the top of a, of a filter material of some kind.
And then you put a fan on it that way because one gal evaporating one gallon over the course of a week would be pretty easy to do if you had a little bit of air circulation and had it wick.
And then you wouldn’t have to dump it at all anymore.
Chris
Yeah, you’d have to change the filter like once every six months for particulates that would accumulate.
Andy
Yeah.
Yeah.
But then you wouldn’t have to dump it at all anymore.
Chris
Yeah.
Andy
Just a random thought.
Kevin
That sounds kind of more
Frank
fun!
It sounds more fun!
Chris
It’s a little more complex to set up initially, but it’ll end up requiring a lot less maintenance overall.
Andy
Plus, you know, spending an hour to save 10 minutes over the course of the thing’s entire life is totally worth it.
Probably more than an hour designing something that large, I mean.
Kevin
Yeah.
And the other, and really the pumping it to the drain, then you have to get into the, the viscosity of the gas and stuff.
Cause it’s only the outer diameter of the, of this exhaust tube is only six millimeters.
So the inner diameter is going to be closer to like four.
It’s, it’s a really narrow tube.
So it would, I think it might overburden the system when it blows it off because it’s not like a passive exhaust either.
It actually will forcefully blow it and that’s when it sprays.
Andy
Ah, okay.
Frank
And all I, all I can think right now is give it some baffles before, just after it exits the tube, that’ll slow down the water particles enough.
Chris
I was thinking a one-way valve, that’d be pretty simple and it would keep spray, keep it from actually spraying, spraying as opposed to, yeah.
Frank
So Kevin, you have officially reached the position where we are going to solve your problem for you, whether you want this to or not.
Kevin
Well, it’s not, it’s not like it’s spraying from the exhaust tube.
It’s that the tube, it, it hits the gas, cause it’s mostly gas.
And then the tube will hit the accumulated water in there and cause a disturbance that then causes the water that’s already there to spray out.
Frank
Yeah.
Well, if you evaporated, there’s nothing already there to spray
Kevin
that’s true too.
Frank
Not that you needed us to solve your problem anyway.
Andy
No.
It sounds like a fun problem to solve though.
Frank
I agree.
There is that.
Chris
I did come across something for you, Kevin, that you can probably use your FDM printer for.
I just posted it in the chat.
I found it last night when I was just goofing around looking at stuff.
Well, you guys don’t play Munchkin, but it’s a, it’s a very fun game.
A Munchkin is awesome game.
Andy
So what about you, Frank?
Have you done anything?
Frank
I have done very little the last couple of weeks.
Actually over the holiday, I had my nephew over for four or five days before Independence Day.
And one of the things that he wanted to do, we do it with all of my brother’s kids because they live far enough away from humanity that we want to give them an excuse to not compete with their brothers and get attention from adults and that sort of thing.
So the one nephew as part of the activities that he wanted to do while he was with us was decide on something to 3D print.
Andy
Okay.
Frank
And he decided he wanted a dog and we went with a, it’s a shaggy, it’s a golden retriever model.
And so I printed off like three or four of those trying to get it right.
My under extrusion issue came back weirdly.
And so I played with that a little bit.
I ended up using the last little bit of my glow in the dark and had like 10 layers left.
So it’s from the dogs eyebrow up is not there.
And I printed him off a red one.
So it’s the glow in the dark green and a dark red one.
And I ended up printing off a gray one after I changed some other parameters and got a good print on that one.
So you got one good print out of three.
Chris
Sounds about par for the course.
Frank
Yeah.
And that’s what I told him is like, you’re going to try a couple of times until you get it right.
That’s actually what I try to use my gray for and save my colors for final prints.
Just by expected the second one to do much better than it did.
So I did that.
I found these little things on I think they’re on Thingiverse called Fibonacci hooks.
Chris
Oh, yeah.
And it follows the design of the Fibonacci sequence two, four, eight, 16, you know.
Andy
One, one, three, five, eight.
Chris
Our listeners can just Google Fibonacci and
Andy
or no, it’s one, one, two, three, five.
Frank
That’s right.
Fibonacci is the adding one.
I can’t remember.
I use a different sequence often and confuse them.
Anyway, so it’s called a Fibonacci hook.
And it’s just got the short part for the short part of the Fibonacci sequence.
And then it’s got a longer part.
Twice as long that goes underneath your shell for bench or whatever.
So it has the leverage for a hook.
And the hook part is in line with the longer arm.
Chris
And whatever weight you put on the hook is counterbalanced on the little bottom part on the longer arm.
Frank
Yeah.
Yeah.
It’s a fun little hook.
I’ve got so many cables that have been accumulating on my desk that being able to just place a hook and hang those cables has been convenient rather than re spooling them and then unspooling it when I want it five minutes later.
So
Andy
yeah.
Frank
And that’s really all I did the last couple of weeks as far as printing, but I had guests over and I have a great view of the valley as everyone is seen now that Andy, you’ve come by and you were the last one that hadn’t seen this view.
And so for Independence Day, me and my wife like to have people over and we like to watch fireworks in the whole Salt Lake Valley.
Andy
That had to be neat.
Yeah.
Chris
Yeah.
We get those great views and it’s awesome.
Andy
Chris has got another one off the side of the terrace there looking out over Roy Riverdale area.
It’s beautiful.
Frank
Yeah.
Chris
Yeah.
The whole west area.
Chris
Yeah.
Can’t beat my across the street neighbors view that I got.
Frank
Have you got new neighbors?
Are they exhibitionists?
Andy
Oh, I hope not.
Frank
Cover the children’s eyes whenever the curtains are open.
Andy
Oh, I do have a lot of fun of putting the drone up in the air and watching fireworks go off just at a different perspective, but it’s not like, oh, let’s sit around the TV and see what the drone sees kind of thing.
Plus this year, like I said, we did the rocket thing.
So it was a little bit different.
Kids went to the neighbors and watched fireworks with them.
So they still got a little bit of fireworks, but they didn’t have to come from my wallet.
They were still garbage fireworks though, I’ll tell you.
But the rocket thing was the funner for then the fireworks.
Frank
Salt Lake did a drone exhibition instead of fireworks this year.
Andy
I still want to go and see one of those, one of the good ones that they did.
Frank
Did you see it at all from your I was so like, they did it at the beginning of the weekend.
I didn’t expect them to do a Saturday morning instead of on the fourth.
Yeah, I guess it makes sense because they wanted to avoid work, negative impacting people going to work and that sort of thing.
Not that it really changed anything because everyone was still off until four o’clock lighting off fireworks.
But…
Kevin
that’s why I’ve always said that I feel like we should get the day off on the fifth instead of the fourth because the parties all happen at night time.
I mean, yeah, there’s a little bit of prep you have to do for it, but…
Frank
that can be done anytime leading up to though, because they start selling the fireworks on the second.
Kevin
Yeah…
Frank
I think in Utah.
So anyway,
Kevin
I think it’s even sooner.
Frank
It may be no, the second is the earliest you can start lighting your fireworks.
Kevin
Yeah, they start selling them toward the end of June though.
Frank
Yeah, I do remember that now.
Chris
But yeah.
Well, yeah, I’m in a firework restricted area.
So just like Andy, we kind of do our own thing.
But, you know, we’ve got a great view so we can put up a couple lawn chairs in the backyard and see fireworks across the whole valley.
But then when we get bored with seeing fireworks over the valley will come inside and we do a glow party.
So we bought a bunch of glow sticks and whatever else.
And I found a few different connectors and things so you could make like eyeglasses and bunny ears and balls.
So one thing we did was we took a really, really cheap kids bowling bowling set and instead and instead of using the plastic ball that comes with the we put we put UV stickers on the tops of each of the pins so you can see where they’re at in a black light.
And then you use the glow sticks with the little connectors so that it’s a ball of glow sticks and you use that for bowling.
Frank
That would be fun.
Yeah.
And the connectors for those glow sticks are not enormously complex anyway.
Chris
Nope.
Frank
Especially the long super thin ones that you use for the necklaces and the wrists and all that.
Andy
Yeah.
Chris
Sorry.
Andy
Very true.
Chris
But yeah, it’s like a six millimeter diameter or something like that.
And..
Andy
okay.
Chris
Easy.
Andy
Yeah, it sounds like a lot of fun.
Frank
Any configuration.
And I know it’s still a chemical reaction.
I just don’t think it’s the same liquid chemical reaction that are in your normal, what is it, 30 millimeter diameter glow stick?
Andy
Really?
Frank
Yeah.
Well, it’s meant for use with kids.
So I don’t expect they…
Chris
Well they’re supposed to be non toxic, you know, and there’s lots of people that, you know, cut them open and put them into like old soda bottles or whatever else to make lanterns and yeah.
Kevin
And try to convince you that if you mix hydrogen peroxide with Mountain Dew, it’ll glow.
That’s not how it works, by the way.
Frank
Don’t want to burst your bubble.
Spoiler alert.
Chris
But if you do take some tonic water, it does glow under black light.
So that’s that’s kind of fun.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
A lot of things glow under black light.
Yeah, not just human fluids.
Chris
Yeah, get a pet platypus.
Yeah, I printed off some non rocket related things over this last weekend, too.
Frank
Well, you missed your chance, Andy.
It’s too late.
No, what did you work on, dude?
Andy
You’re talking about connectors and making little connectors for glow in the dark stuff for the little tubes.
And that kind of got me reminded about connecting tubes.
And for my fish tanks here during the summertime, evaporation has gotten kind of ridiculous.
And I’ve been sitting here bubbling a gallon of water to get the chlorine out of it, about every other day, just to keep my fish tanks water level proper.
And I just got kind of tired of doing it.
So I kind of hokeyed together.
I got a six gallon jerry can that I can bubble a full six gallons at once, and then made a little pump or not made, but got a little pump and attached it to it with a little switch and made like a little hook for a hose that could hang on the fish tank to be able to put water from that jerry can into the tanks.
Chris
It’s a little note for the for our visual listeners.
That’s a little U shaped tube that sits over the end of the top of the tank there.
Andy
Yeah, that way it kind of holds a quarter inch vinyl tube in a hook shape.
So I can just hook it on to the tank, whichever tank I want to top off.
And then the little pump I’ve got a mount that connects to the top of the jerry can that has got two holes for the water coming out from the pump and for the air bubbler going into the jerry can to bubble out the chlorine.
And and then I just got a switch on top I could turn on to pump the water from the jerry can up into the tank.
Chris
You’re going to automate this so well that you know after humanity is long gone, your fish will be in the tank going.
Andy
I did get some float sensors, some cheap little float detector, so I can detect water level.
I was considering maybe doing something.
I mean, you guys seen my overly complicated thermostat that I made for the house out of a what’s it called a micro controller and 3d printed case and and all that to control the thermostat.
I was thinking about using that same setup that same board because the software I made for that board is pretty robust to be able to make menus and things like that out of.
And so I could just go ahead and reconfigure it to be able to do stuff for my fish tanks.
But it’d be nice to have like auto water level control and and temperature control.
The fans I put on top of the fish tanks cool down the fish tanks well, but they they do it by causing by forcing evaporation.
And it doesn’t always need to be done.
I mean, at night I got the air conditioner running down in this room.
And so it doesn’t need to be the fans need to be on.
And I’ve gotten in the habit of turning them off at night and turning them on during the day.
But you know, for the first half of the day, they don’t even need to be running.
I just don’t want to miss turning them on and having the fish get up, you know, hot later.
Chris
So yeah, it’s actually a good idea.
Yeah, it’s a good idea to automate that anyway, because now that LED lights are a thing, the biggest electrical electrical waste happening in houses now is fan motors.
Andy
Is it really?
Chris
Yep.
Andy
That’s good to hear.
Frank
So that actually fits in with an idea that I’ve actually had for a while.
But I was reminded of while Andy was talking about automating his fish maintenance.
And the idea is, because most homes have a central location for their heater or their AC.
And they only typically have one sensor for the temperature.
And you said it when I was living with you, there’s no sense in warming up the whole house just so that your bedroom is warm.
And that might be when I started formulating the idea of reconfiguring your home’s ducting, so that there’s little flaps that close at each of the intersections.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
And if you put thermostats in all the rooms, you can have individually temperature rooms.
Yeah.
And just close the flaps in your ducting so it pushes all the heat or all the cold where the temperature needs to change.
And it would take microcontrollers.
You can probably do it with some sturdy cardboard or some really thin wood.
It doesn’t need to be that robust for the flap.
But you would need something more robust for the actual main controller and for the when tells your heater when to warm up and that sort of thing.
But if you could, it would be really expensive too.
And that’s probably why most people don’t do it.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
But I feel like being able to control the temperature in your house on that really small, specific level would save you a lot of energy too.
Andy
I think so too.
Frank
because you would only be warming up one room or cooling off one room at a time.
And because we all carry our devices with us anyway, I mentioned earlier, we’re all basically cyborgs right now anyway.
You can rig it up so your phone tells your house what room you’re in and you have a profile on your phone that says, I like it at this temperature.
And if everybody does that, it averages the temperature that everybody likes.
Andy
Yeah.
I consider doing this.
You can buy registers that are electrically controlled to be able to open and close that makes that part really simple.
And so I can consider putting those kind of registers throughout the house and then running and putting a thermostat on the register itself too.
So you can determine the inside you’ll just on the outside of the register itself.
But with the wires going into the register and then running all the wires inside of the ducting of the house, that way I wouldn’t have to run new wires.
And then putting it at the thermostat at the top of the normal one thermostat place where you’d still have to go to that thermostat, turn things on and off.
But that way you’d only be adding registers to the existing, you know, in the existing system instead of adding like something on the wall or something for each room.
However, the problem I ran into is the damage you can do to your furnace that isn’t designed to do stuff like this by limiting the airflow.
So if you have one room that put a call for heat, open one register with all the other registers closed, trying to force that much air through one single register would be very, very effective at heating that one room.
Can you imagine having the all the output of the furnace going forward?
Yeah, yeah.
But but you would be limiting the the throughput through the heat exchanger greatly and would wind up making the heat exchanger or the furnace overall far less efficient.
You could really see it with the when I added a couple more vents to my furnace for like the living room downstairs that didn’t have a vent.
I wound up adding one to it.
The one in one of the rooms downstairs here received a quarter of the air, just one room, a quarter of the output of the furnace itself.
Frank
Because it wasn’t smaller, mild room, right?
Andy
Yes, yes.
And I wound up closing that completely off because we weren’t nobody was using that room and there was no use in heating it.
But that was a quarter of the heat from the furnace.
And I was just thinking it would go through the rest of the room.
And you know me, I’m really bug at big at checking temperatures and things like that.
The output temperature of my exhaust on my furnace went up with or excuse me, it went way down.
When I put added the register to the living room downstairs, adding a register made it go down.
And then that kind of led me thinking oh, let me take the the room that an open it’s register up that nobody’s in and see what that does to the exhaust temperature of the furnace and it shot way down too.
So restricting the flow on the furnace really raises the exhaust temperature making it far, far, far less efficient.
And so thinking of it that way, the reason why I never did anything like that was if I wanted to heat up one room, I’m blowing off a huge amount of heat just out of the home through the exhaust.
Yeah, actually going in somewhere else in the in the house.
Chris
Using the airflow in your house itself is actually far more efficient.
That’s why it’s it’s good to leave doors, you know, half ajar or whatever while during during the winter and and and then during the extreme summer if you’re using central air…
Frank
because it spreads out the temperature kind of overall.
Andy
But if I had a get a newer furnace that you can control the throughput better, you know, then doing something like that would be awesome.
Frank
And I was just thinking heat pumps have become a thing.
Andy
Yeah.
Chris
So I really want to get one of those.
Frank
I wonder how that would be affected by a more macro attunement.
Andy
I bet that would be better.
Chris
Well, they call them heat pumps, but they call them heat pumps, but they actually work both ways.
So if it’s middle of summer, middle of the night and it’s cooler outside than it is inside your house, it’ll pull air from outside to cool down your house first rather than kicking your AC on right away.
Andy
No, a heat pump will pull heat from outside.
It doesn’t actually control any air movement from outside.
Chris
Okay, so maybe we’re thinking about different things then.
Yeah, a heat pump is an air conditioner that can run in both directions.
It can air condition outside and pump the exhaust heat inside the house, which is making it a heater, even though it’s just air conditioning outside, but it’s being a very effective heater inside.
But a lot of areas, if you’ve got a good or a very constant temperature outside, or if the outside temperature is drastically different from the inside temperature in the direction you’re trying to pump the heat, a heat pump can be far more efficient financially than burning gas with the heater house.
Kevin
Yeah, we have a heat pump and they’re awesome.
It actually works as long as the outside temperature is above freezing.
Andy
Yeah, in our area, it’s kind of one of those things where it’s good to have one.
It’s good to use it but have a backed up normal furnace because we do get really cold.
Kevin
That’s the setup we have.
We broke it at one point and the people who came to fix it were like, well, why do you guys have a heat pump?
Don’t you realize you live in Utah?
Kevin
Yes, I do realize I live in Utah, but I also have solar panels.
It’s a lot less expensive for me to use electricity to heat my house than it is for me to burn gas.
Andy
I didn’t know you did solar.
Kevin
Yeah.
Andy
I’m going to have to talk to you about that later because I’m thinking of moving that direction myself.
How long ago did you put panels on your house?
Kevin
It’s been a few years.
Chris
I think it was like five or six years ago.
Kevin
Something like that, yeah.
Andy
That’s cool.
I’ll have to bug you about that after the podcast because this year or next year, well, that’s always been the plan per year was that this year or maybe next year we’ll do it.
We’ve just never done it yet.
Kevin
Right.
Frank
It’s on the list.
Andy
Yeah, it’s on the list.
Chris
I’m redoing my roof before I do that, before I go that route.
Kevin
Yes, that is a highly recommended thing because when we got our solar panels, we got it through Vivint and Vivint told us, they’re like, yeah, if you ever need to redo your roof, let us know.
We’ll come out and remove the panels, then we’ll get your roof redone and then we’ll put them on and it won’t cost anything extra.
Well, Vivint got bought out by a different company.
We had to get our roof redone and it hadn’t been five years yet.
They said, okay, yeah, well, you’re going to have to pay for us to come out and do this for you.
It was basically the same cost as having them installed in the first place.
We’re like, what the crap?
This is what we were told and we’re like, well, we don’t honor that and we didn’t have it in writing.
They said if it had been more than five years, then we’d give you a pretty good discount.
But since it hasn’t, you get nothing.
We weren’t very happy with that.
Frank
Cost of doing business.
Andy
Yeah.
Frank
Well, I do feel like we’ve kind of gone well and truly far afield.
So why don’t we bring it back and close this up and we can go on with the other stuff that’s going on today.
Andy & Kevin in unison
Sounds good.
Frank
We’d like to thank everyone for listening to the very end.
Chris
The very, very end.
Frank
If you like what you hear, please give us all the stars and subscribe.
We are available through a wide variety of podcast vendors and so we’re easy to share.
If you have feedback or if you have content requests, please let us know.
You can find us in our Facebook group, Amateur 3D Pod, or you can email us at panelists@amateur3dpod.com.
For individual feedback, you can email us at Franklin, Kevin, Andy, or Chris @amateur3dpod.com
Kevin Buckner wrote the music for this episode and OpenAI’s Whisperer completed the heavy lifting for the transcripts, which you can find linked in the description.
Wow, that’s definitely going to get cut out.
Andy, hopefully.
Our panelists are me, Franklin Christensen, and my friends, Kevin Buckner, Chris Weber, and Andy Cotto.
And until next time, we’re going offline.
Kevin
Keep your FEP tight.
Frank
I guess Andy doesn’t want to go first.
Chris
I was waiting for Andy to go first.
Yeah.
Andy
Oh, I always go last.
Oh, that threw me off.
I’m sorry.
I got nothing.
Frank
Well, it throws you off when Chris goes before you.
So we made a point of trying to alternate.
Chris
What are you going to do?
Blead on me.
Frank
Yeah, something like that.
I don’t want to know.
That’s the second time I have stopped myself from asking that question.
I will continue to override that question as long as I possibly can.