3d printing

Since I have a fully enclosed 3d printer, I figured I might as well give some more difficult materials a try.

PLA vs ABS, the hammer test :)

 
The enclosure does nothing to keep harmful vapours and particulates away from you unless it's ventilated. As someone who has printed ABS and ASA before, make sure you have adequate ventilation as ABS produces a ton of nasty stuff when you print with it.
 
The enclosure does nothing to keep harmful vapours and particulates away from you unless it's ventilated. As someone who has printed ABS and ASA before, make sure you have adequate ventilation as ABS produces a ton of nasty stuff when you print with it.
Yeah, the enclosure is mostly for keeping the chamber at the correct temp. But, my glowforge laser came with a super long exhaust hose. I repurposed that and routed it from the P1S case/exhaust fan out the nearby window.

Even so, the air in the room smelled vaugely like hot styrofoam, so I grabbed one of my covid-era N95 masks and mostly stayed out of there until the room had well ventilated. The printer enclosure is airtight, but I imagine most of the stuff got sucked out the fan and out the window.

(edit to correct a typo..."isn't airtight")
 
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So, the house I bought came with American Standard Champion toilets. The flush valve is *not* compatible with any of the "universal flush valve" replacements you can get at Walmart for cheap. And, it's got a huge non-standard freaking nut holding it into the tank.

I wanted to just replace the gasket of this leaking toilet, but I didn't have anything that I could use to get the nut off. So, I ended up buying a whole $30.00 branded replacement valve. But I have calipers, and, you know, fuck these guys for that shit.

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once my print test succeeds, I'm putting this damn thing on all of the maker sites.
 
Printed a couple tests that were slightly off in size. I was using my caliper on the inner surfaces of the octagon on the wrench, but I don't think I was getting a good reading. After a couple fudges, I was frustrated.

So, I stopped to run to the store to give my brain a chance to chew on it. Got back, measured the flat surfaces of the nut octagon (instead of trying to measure the wrench itself), found a website that would take that wall-to-wall measurement and convert it to a vertex to vertex measurement, and I cut that value in half, and put *that* in fusion when designing the thing.

Like a glove...


Most maker sites require you to post a picture of the whole print, so that's churning out now. Screw you American Standard ;)
 
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I'm such a dude.

I'm looking at some software called ZBrush..if I get good at it, i can make my own non-engineering style models to print. So I opened it up, knowing nothing about it, saw that they had a bunch of demo projects to get you started, one of which was a naked female, all barbie-style with no bits.

So, of course, I had to fiddle around to see if I could give her a slit and nips
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shelf brackets are so damn expensive, yo.

So, I had the wild idea to put a couple of shelves up in my booth at the local ren-faire next year. I thought I'd use my newly furnished workshop to cut some shelves, and just buy some shelf brackets from lowes or home depot or amazon. But at $7.00 to $50.00 each, screw that.

I can't print them in PLA...ABS is probably not the best since these will be experiencing a fair amount of UV. But since I've already tried ABS, TPU, and PETG in addition to PLA, why not give ASA a try? It's relatively inexpensive, and has good temperature and UV resistance. So much so, it's used for things like siding, garden furniture, and sports equipment.

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I can print a pair of these for $2.50. Screw on some OSB that I have already in the workshop, and voila. Shelves on the cheap. And then I'd have a nifty place to store/display/market these goblets and mugs I've been making that I think will do great at a ren faire.

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The room is closed off, ventilation is as per my ABS printing. And I'm pretty much staying out of the room for the next 6 hours.
Thankfully, my printer has a camera (albeit a pretty poor one) that lets me keep an eye on things from afar.
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No center brace?
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Otherwise I would expect the center of the arc to bow out once compressed by weight from above that tries to make your 90deg angle into 89. Then 88, 87, etc.

--Patrick
 
Working on my design skills some more. My girlfriend has asked for a cutesy cloud shelf, but she wanted it as an 'invisible' shelf. I wanted it easy to assemble, so I decided on making a cleat that you screw into the wall, and the shelf just hangs on it, like the mushroom shelves I posted last page.

But since this wasn't something I just pulled off a maker site, I had to engineer that stuff myself in Fusion.

First step: design a cutesy cloud shelf:
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Second step: Steal the cleat design from the mushroom shelves. Since it's a purely functional design, there are no copyrightable elements in the cleat itself. This is easier said than done: Fusion makes it a big PITA to work from .STL files. You have to pull it in as a mesh, clean up any mesh flaws, of which there are usually many: Converting from a solid in software like blender or fusion to a mesh of triangles and then back into a parametric solid introduces all kinds of problems. One analogy I've read is it's like smashing a mirror and reassembling the pieces and expecting it to work/look like the original. But I've done it enough that I can do pretty well with most things these days.

Third Step: Engineer a space in my cloud shelf to house the cleat, and perform negative extrusions to cut out the required spaces. Do a little chamfering to match the cleat angles
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Once all the sectional analysis looked good, I printed a test fit: Just the cleat and the small bit of shelf it fit into.
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That test went well.

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So the final step: Print! (profit?)
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edit: it works :)
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more practical design/prints:

You can buy these workbench assembly kits online to make building workbenches super simple. But they're $45 each. Between that and wood costs, you might as well buy a pre-made bench!
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Now, I've made 2x4 work benches before. In fact, there are 3 in my workshop right now. But I need 3 or 4 more for my booth at the local ren-faire, and without the kits, squaring everything all up takes more time than the rest of the bench combined. The kits make that part super simple. So, i bought *one*, got out my calipers, and went to work.

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voila :) Now, I can print them at a cost of about $8.00 per workbench. Much better value.
 
So is the point to be able to break down the table for transport? I think making some folding sawhorses with notches for crossbeams would be quicker and easier, though it would be more upfront effort to build.
 
The point is to just jam 2x4s into the braces, and screw them in, and you have a workbench without having to spend a lot of time fooling around with squaring stuff up if you don't use braces.

 
But wouldn't making the blocks out of plastic mean they'd be...

...ah, ok. Nevermind.

--Patrick
Once all the screws are in, the blocks are kind of useless. They're not a support mechanism. The #10 wood screws hold it all together. You could chip/melt/sand away the braces at that point and be fine. They're just there to line things up. These thing save me like 30-60 minutes when making a bench. Which is worth $8 or so. $45, not so much.
 
I'm always a bit let down when I see an awesome practical print that I have absolutely no use for.
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