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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • There’s literally someone in this thread right now saying you can eat raw pork in America without worry…

    The correct response to that is to provide the actual guidelines based on actual data, not to fearmonger while quoting lines referencing wild game.

    A huge part of why commercial pork is safe – that you’re consistently leaving out – were major changes to how livestock are raised. Trichinosis transmission in pigs is primarily caused by the consumption of infected meat; US standards were changed to more strictly control what’s fed to pigs, which led to the decreased risk. The risk remains in wild boar because they’re omnivores that will scavenge whatever they can find.

    145 is still a limit people need to follow, lots of people don’t.

    145 isn’t a hard limit. It’s the recommended holding temperature for one minute.








  • The NRA is pretty low on the list of organizations that would have tried to push the issue if this involved someone not named Hunter Biden. They’re very much a culture war outlet that won’t go to bat for anyone they consider an undesirable.

    There are other advocacy groups that have been talking about this issue for a number of years, though. And there have been lower court rulings this year that make whether that provision of Form 4473 is going to be able to withstand scrutiny questionable.

    Like I said, where these gun rights groups land on this case is going to be pretty telling about where they stand generally. The culture warriors will come up with excuses. It should be an interesting barometer for whether these groups actually believe in universal application of what they consider rights.



  • It doesn’t help that, by the power of marketing, people can mean multiple distinctly different things when they say “bed leveling”.

    What you’re referring to is Z offset. This is the difference between where the endstop or probe triggers versus the actual Z coordinate of the nozzle. This is generally what you’re trying to set with the paper test. The paper test is only mostly accurate, though. A set of feeler gauges will do the same job with better accuracy.

    It can also mean tramming, which is making the bed itself planar to the printer’s gantry. This is what you’re doing when you adjust the ‘bed leveling’ screws on a printer or what happens automatically if you have triple lead ‘bed leveling.’ It pretty critical that Z offset is set correctly for autotramming. Manual tramming is essentially setting Z offset to be consistent at each of the bed adjustment points.

    Finally, mesh compensation also gets called bed leveling. Even if you have a perfectly trammed bed, the reality is that real, physical things (like beds) are never perfectly flat. Mesh compenstation probes multiple points along the bed, registers the difference between Z0 and the probed point, and builds a mesh that the printer uses to compensate for variations in the bed surface. The denser the mesh, the better the printer can compensate for small variations in surface flatness.

    All of these things are complementary and will have an impact on each other. The fact that they all get lumped into “bed leveling” causes a lot of confusion for folks when understanding what each is and does is pretty important to get the most out of a printer.


  • That’s inconsistent extrusion.

    As others have mentioned, the first thing I’d look at is thoroughly drying the filament. TPU is very hygroscopic and will become nearly unprintable within a couple of days of coming out of the dryer.

    Beyond that, you may be trying to run it faster than your hotend can melt it. TPU is pretty resistant to melt and cranking temp doesn’t help a whole lot. Actual flow can vary pretty wildly between brands depending on their exact blend but I’ve seen TPUs that refuse to flow more than around 2mm³/s through a standard 0.4 nozzle. (Volumetric flow is roughly layer height * width * linear speed).


  • A 2.4 will be better than an Ender 3, but there are better options out there. The flying gantry is a solution in search of a problem, the gantry is heavy and not particularly rigid, Voron toolheads don’t cool particularly well, the rigid bed mounting is a recipe for bed taco, etc.

    Which isn’t to say that V2s are bad printers – they can turn out great prints. But if you’re starting fresh today, I’d seriously consider any number of printers over it.

    If you want to stay within the Voron ecosystem for whatever reason, the Trident’s a better design. It still lacks things like kinematic bed mounting that are standard fair on other designs today, though. I’d stay away from Tap on any of them – I’m still baffled that thing gets promoted as being a good idea.

    In terms of bang for your buck, it’s incredibly difficult to beat the VzBot kits. It’ll be a less expensive and more capable machine than a V2.4. There are panels available to enclose it. I don’t love the Z stage on it, but I can overlook it given the value the rest of the printer gets you.

    The Annex K3 is an absolutely killer little machine, but is only 180x180 build volume. The small build volume is free rigidity, though, and K3s can be made true high temp capable with less relative effort than a lot of printers. I’m not as big a fan of the larger Annex printers (K1/K2), personally.

    The Rat Rig v-Core was probably the best value CoreXY before the VzBot kits came around. Enclosing them is more of a challenge due to all the PETG parts, though. The EVA toolhead provides a ton of flexibility for mixing and matching parts, if that’s your thing.

    In terms of take it out of the box and print, nothing beats the Bambu X1 and P1P. They’re great units. They’re a closed ecosystem though, and not modification friendly if that’s what you want.

    My main workhorse printer’s a Railcore II. Great machine, but the design’s aging and I generally wouldn’t recommend a new build today outside of a few very specific applications. It was cutting edge when the design was released in 2018, but, as with the 2.4, the wider community has learned a lot since then about fundamental printer design and there are better options now.



  • I am by no means a fan of DWS, but this is a tired old narrative that’s always been questionable at best.

    DWS and the DNC absolutely had a personal preference for Clinton and definitely did Bernie no favors, but the fact of the matter is that Bernie has simply never been popular enough with Democratic voters to win the nomination. He has always over performed in caucuses and underperformed in primaries in more diverse states. And that’s without getting into the fact that caucuses are less democratic and have real accessibility issues in the first place. He lost the popular vote among Democrats by more than 3.5 million votes.

    Unfortunately, the story has become “the DNC stole the election” when the reality is that a cranky old man from Vermont who has always had trouble connecting with the black voters that are a core part of the Democratic voting bloc didn’t have the popularity needed to make it out of the primaries, twice.

    It’d be more helpful for progressive politics to focus on why that was and finding a candidate who can message in a way that appeals more broadly to the party as a whole, but instead we’re constantly relitigating how the DNC magically pressed buttons that caused Bernie to lose within the party by millions of votes.