I’ll third it, I used Solidworks before, freecad was fairly easy to adapt to before the 1.0 release, workflow is even nicer now, trying to convince my dad to move to freecad over paying for a sw subscription now that he’s retired.

I’m not sure how bambu studio does it (use prusa/superslicer) but chiming in because I was trying to figure this out last year doing a large ish batch of keychains for a friend and was fighting a bit with it, probably is a way of doing it all in freecad but the image was my biggest issue.

I ended up doing things in blender to subtract the image and the slicer itself, did a text object, positioned it where I wanted, merged the objects and marked the text as a negative volume (think that’s the term, might be subtract) so it was subtracted when I sliced it, might help in your case?

I was wondering if it was some sort of alignment/clamp for something like pipes or rods, or maybe some sort of bushing/bearing holders (think linear rods). Your tuning looks great btw, look pretty nice even in the worst case lighting conditions, adhesion not an issue doing this way? My dad asked me to print some stuff he designed for his beekeeping tools, has a bearing surface that’s awkward to print accurately, I’m probably going to revisit that with this as inspiration, other than the helper ears I see on the build plate anything else you did?

To ask questions, for the application does dimensional accuracy actually matter? AFAIK rebar isn’t exactly the tightest wrt tolerances (I know flat products, not long products, but knowing what hotroll coils look like I’m assuming it’s similar), could probably have gotten away with a different orientation and could probably have avoided supports (I find arches print nicely). Having said that though, thinking strength might be another reason to print the way you did, face down and you have shear & torsion in between layers, thinking that’s still a concern if you printed it standing, but yeah, just thoughts.

Edit: also spy kapton tape, did you find the bubble insulation made much of a difference? I’m putting what’s basically heat barrier fabric on the interior as a first try, I grabbed some rock wool and bubble insulation but it’s thick enough that I’m mildly concerned with it interfering with the gantry, having everything off for some refurb and wow I forgot just how close everything is, they really didn’t waste space eh?

Softening and that, maybe? But it really depends on the filament brand too, as far as I’m aware, acetone doesn’t readily dissolve in acetone which is what’s meant by not doing much

Petg is pretty resistant, why PETs used for bottles.

Personal experience cleaning up clogged nozzles by immersing them, yeah acetone barely touched the petg

Petg inside the enclosed though can definitely have a short service life, the original x axis idler on my mk3s gave up the ghost after a month or so of pretty consistent printing of abs in the summer, had expected it so i the first thing I did in abs was a set of prusa spares which lasted until I did a bear mod last year.
There’s obviously variation in filament though so YMMV, petg is still a solid material to use if you don’t have an enclosure (though I’m always recommending then if only for gasses and fine particles while printing)

I’ve found it varies from manufacturer to manufacturer as well as colour, some of the petg I’ve got has been chilling in my cabinet in the garage for at least 1 summer and it prints fine, just some stringing, other spools they’re a mess right out the bag. Still worth drying filament, but more so stuff like nylon which is extremely hygroscopic.

Haven’t looked into it but do shops offer lube analysis services? Yeah you could send out your own sample to a lab, having it as a shop service would be way more accessible to people.

Though, in my experience, getting people to commit can be a pain, lots of “yeah I know we have a long p-f interval and it’s super noticeable before it functionally fails, but it’s not that much effort so I’m doing needless maintenance anyhow just in case”, which end of the day you do you.

Mmmm, yeah that sucks, that first block I mentioned was an older style that wasn’t fixed in place and I must have twisted it accidentally after a nozzle change, super slow leak just enveloped the thing, didn’t help there either!

i was thinking along those lines for equipment monitoring stuff, klipper works with Prometheus & grafana (have metrics from my printers), was thinking about looking at using the extra accelerometers I have to do something like vibration monitoring.

I could see using a second sbc for extra sensors as well for support, thinking about printers that don’t run klipper, so long as you can correlate data it should still be useful. Honestly kinda thinking something similar to PLC data, was fantastic for fault finding and failure investigations, also useful for process control + condition based maintenance, there’s a heck of a lot that could be done with it.

Edit: You have me thinking about this now, what would be really cool is an ability to anonymously federate data tied to events, I recall some enterprise software I used like 5-6 years ago could do this with condition indicators, I have 2 machines, I won’t see every failure mode, but if we had 1000 machines you can get much more accurate information about things like MTBF. Heck I’d even just be happy with some community FMEAs, really just thinking of taking a technical approach to my printer maintenance and usage.

What type of filament? Acetone doesn’t do much to things like pla or petg, stuff that works aren’t things you generally want around the house, industrial solvents and stuff. The jar of acetone can soften it up some but you’ll need to soak for some time, I’ve used MEK too, but that’s in the “don’t keep that at home” category, it’s really flammable and should use ppe (I mean should use ppe for a lot of the stuff we use, 99% IPA is harsh on your skin, I use nitriles because it irritates my hands something fierce.)

Cold pull as others recommended, nozzles are consumables, def should keep some around. Cleaning filament works pretty well in my experience if you have a partial clog.

I’ve been there though, first block I didn’t use a sock and the set screws got encased in degraded petg, I ended up scrapping it and putting it on the shelf as a learning moment, def recommend a sock if you don’t have, it’s saved me a lot of grief.

I kept them with linear rods, rails were more than I wanted to do at the time. I changed over to a dragon HF after liking it on my voron, just to keep common parts. Hey, its good to know at least that I can probably push more, tuning a profile for it is definitely going to be on my list.

The ObXidian nozzles are really nice, I just have a 0.4mm and 0.6mm regular nozzles, I’ve used a bunch of hardened coated nozzles before, seem nicer than those but haven’t tested much.

I bear modded mine at the same time and a few other things, biggest for me was that I liked my macros on my voron and I could share them and the motors are substantially quieter.

I haven’t pushed it acceleration wise, do you have any print profiles for prusaslicer or the like? I definitely have room to work with on mine.

There’s a ton of great women in metal, I’ll drop two.

Mares of Thrace, Calgary AB based sludge/post/hardcore 2 piece, guitarist/vocalist is part of the original lineup, it’s heavy and catchy.

I really like Hulder, black metal solo project, some of her early demos are amazing, this version of Into The Crypt of Rays comes to mind, got a wall flag of the art from this in my office.

Oh for sure, there’s exceptions to the rule, I’ve been fooled too. Peste Noir, Drudkh, Deathspell Omega, Burzum all end up on essentials lists, definitely contributes.

At least most nsbm sucks and/or have names like “ss wehrwulf division 1488” so it’s usually really easy to avoid.

Still, be great to have another tool to filter bands.

Edit: looks like it’s going to be based on musicbrainz metadata, checked Burzum because Vikernes is a Nazi and Peste Noir, neither of which have an nsbm tag, nor do Grand Belial’s Key or an actual band called Wehrwolf, probably because of how niche black metal is.

I’ve personally used this list as a place to start, not perfect but it’s something. Metallum lyrical content helps as well.

I switched to using a microplane (or similar super fine grater) for garlic a few years back, it’s far easier to clean and I like it for ginger, nutmeg, hard cheeses etc.

I’m a mechanical eng turned software, computing and the like are super visible but there’s been a huge amount of advancement in physical things in our lifetime, Steel in particular. By no means an expert, some of this I’ve been out of the industry for a while so just operating on memory, totally welcome any corrections!

I’m not a metallurgist, but worked with them, there’s lots of grades out there but some of the stuff being used in automotive is seriously interesting (I think they’re boron grades but I can’t recall), needs specific treatment like hot stamping but they can easily hit into the 1-2 GPa range for yield strength once it’s processed. It’s allowed material to be rolled thinner for the same part strength so you end up with lighter vehicles.

Coatings too have changed a lot, non-chromium passivation is a thing, galvanised materials are no longer just zinc + a bit of aluminum, there’s aluminum + silicon coatings that are supposed to offer decent corrosion resistance at high temperatures, those fancy automotive steels get coated in it for things like mufflers. Construction there were zinc+magnesium coatings starting to show up, supposed to be resistant to coating damage.

Processing has changed a lot in a century too, steel is substantially metallurgically cleaner these days, probably actually cleaner too with more electric arc furnaces and hydrogen direct reduced iron.

It’s oldish these days but pipeline inspection was increasingly using Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducer (EMAT) tools when I worked in that field. It let you do ultrasound inspection of steel pipes without needing a liquid medium, so things like cracks and material defects that are hard (or nearly impossible) to find using Magnetic Flux Leakage tools are a lot more accessible to gas pipeline operators as they don’t need to do things like plan around liquid batching.

I have a 512GB card in my steam deck, seen listings for them upwards of 2 TB, reliability scares me a bit with that much data but still, it’s impressive how far flash memory has come. I remember being excited about a 64MB thumbdrive and buying my first 1GB one.

Bit of a, bit of b, thermal protection on printers sets a minimum hotend and bed temperature, it’s configurable but 0c is pretty common. Drop below that and the firmware will trip an emergency shutdown in klipper, some (mk3s) set off an alarm beeper when that happens.

Higher ambient helps with chamber temps too depending on what you print. I let my printers heat soak for at least an hour before I print anyhow, the space heater gives some stability in ambient temps.

Also done prints where I’ve just blasted the hotend and build plate with a heatgun to get above the min temps to be able to get a heat soak going. Vorons have a decently powerful bed heater (~600w if I recall), my mk3s isn’t nearly as powerful but still capable of sustaining itself (would definitely benefit from insulation)

I don’t live in the coldest place but it’ll hit -20s c at the coldest in the winter with -10 +/-5, summer is 30 +/-5. My garage isn’t climate controlled but not the largest, a space heater is enough to bring ambient up enough to be comfortable, certainly enough where the printer firmware doesn’t kick out on low temperatures.

I have enclosures so it helps some, mk3s doesn’t get super warm as it’s currently setup but I do regularly successfully print abs on it, petg and pla aren’t an issue at all, voron gets substantially warmer. Summer, enclosures need to be open to print pla depending how hot it is. Even with all that, I’d recommend it, I do it primarily for air quality reasons, I’ve printed abs indoors without an enclosure in the same room exactly once a long time ago, 0/10 don’t recommend.