Had a weekend trip with the S/O in-between ring shopping/designing days. Traveled throughout Georgia and stopped through historic sites. Only really hit after the trip that Jimmy Carter was a direct beneficiary of the New Deal, growing up only an hour and a half’s drive (today) from FDR’s ‘vacation’ spot where he recovered from polio - and used as a place to educate himself on the needs of rural Americans. The sheer amount of wealth - personal and public - poured into the place lasted and show further accentuated the difference in legacy . On a national level, it really only seemed like Carter could streamline some of the processes left over from the New Deal and further clean up any credibility as an “outsider” after Watergate. Anyways, used birthday gift to buy a tinywhoop and a cheap RC plane. So out of practice on aerodynamics that the RC was lost to the wind. Big bummer. Earned a tick and plenty of thorn pricks searching the woods adjacent to the field. Ended up swinging by Walmart for a kid-sized kite for a few bucks to at least enjoy the windy evening. Both RC and TinyWhoop kit had spare brushed motors and props. I’ve been really hung up on the idea of building a light-weight monocopter using toroidal or seed-pod propeller. Got a long way to go, and should really start out making simple RC planes first. Dipped into savings for an extremely rare impulse-buy before the tariffs kick in: a 3D printer. Figured it will pay for itself doing design-work, rather than hand-crafting from raw materials with tools I don’t have, or repeatedly purchasing spare parts.
Do not overestimate the competence of the Internet when it comes to troubleshooting 3d-printed parts. Overture PETG and PLA are good about four rolls out of five. If things suddenly change and suck ass it's nothing you did, it's their quality control. There's a vast legacy body of dead bullshit on Thingiverse because Thingiverse has been mismanaged for more than a decade. There's a vast thriving community on Printables because Prusa decided Thingiverse was too embarrassing to deal with. Both communities suffer a continual brain drain to Cults because people start getting greedy at about the thousandth download and put their shit behind a paywall. Anycubic PETG and PLA cost barely more than Amazon Basics and are of vastly higher quality. They're also regularly on sale. There, see, you never have to experience the heartbreak of Overture. All of the filament you will buy will be Chinese. Prices may well go up. The good shit is ProtoPasta, which is made in Oregon. It's spendy but of impeccable quality. Maybe less spendy now, comparatively speaking. Nobody has a good support algorithm. You will need to learn how to draw supports for anything even vaguely challenging. PLA is about four times as easy to work with as PETG. PETG is substantially more durable. ABS is only necessary for high temperature shenanigans; as a material I hate it. PLA should be glued down on a smooth sheet. ABS should be glued down mercilessly on a smooth sheet. PETG should be printed on a textured sheet. You should wash them with soap and water occasionally but much less often than you think. Don't resort to IPA or anything dumb; see above about internet. Concerns about VoCs out of 3d prints are greatly overblown. ABS stinks but the level of toxins it kicks out are around a tenth what you get simply living with a laser printer. That said, an enclosure keeps temperatures more stable and it matters if you're printing anything more exotic than PETG. If you're replacing nozzles more often than once every six to eight months you're doing something wrong. And don't worry, you'll do a lot of shit wrong. But eventually you'll realize that all the advice you're reading is also wrong. The "makers" will convince you that you should do everything in OnShape. They are fucking dumbasses. The "professional makers" will give you coupon codes for OnShape while doing everything in Fusion. They are dire fucking dumbasses. You will flail around for a while trying to prove me wrong and then you will do what everyone with half a clue eventually does, which is succumb to SolidWorks. It will cost you like $80 a year from Cleverbridge, and then you will spend two months' tuition at SolidProfessor getting through the first and second levels of self-education. Seriously. Start there. I had a fifteen year autoCAD education and experience with Solidworks 1.0 backintheday and I couldn't so much as draw a cube in SolidWorks without going through basic training. But once you go through basic training the world is your oyster. I would say I print out maybe nineteen designs of mine for every one I print for someone else. Everyone's designs are so bad.
Most prints I've seen across YT have had some form of jank associated with them to get the job done - post-print sanding by hand, acetone vapor smoothing, or hard to grasp support systems. Most of these are hobbyists doing testing videos which end with some sort of "lol oops" error w.r.t. makeshift post-print processes. BUT, that seems part of the fun. Good to know on VoCs. That and the fire risk OB joked about were the most chatted about when googling safety concerns... though concerns about fumes never seemed substantiated. Or, at least not as well documented as house fires. Threw a few extra spools into the 'cart' before ordering. For better or worse, there's an IKEA trip in the cards now for storage. Got a whole new bookmark folder with this and veen's comments. Really gotta get a workspace that's away from the pets (read: seriously consider speeding up plans for a house if the Powers That Be make it possible without strife). But
You gotta keep in mind that you don't know how many of the people in the hobby are twelve. Once upon a time there was a column in Pro Sound News called "the cranky old sound mixer" which was some nameless flinty asshole who basically shit on every trend. he was right more often than he was wrong. One need only search "orcs with tits" in Hubski to get my general opinion on the 3d printing community. That was before I got a cheez whiz printer; I will know also refer to "knitting for dudes." My wife and I agree that "maker" is one of the dirtiest words the millennials ever coined. It's their way of saying "dilettante, but make it aspirational." You have to be exceptionally stupid to have a printer catch fire. Not that there aren't a lot of exceptionally stupid people out there but! PLA extrudes at like 220 degrees. Water boils at like 212. You have to have reached new heights of stupidity if your melty process involves combustion-grade temperatures. And yeah - you probably don't like the smell. Those of us who grew up building plastic models can tell you that what you're smelling is orders of magnitude more benign than we used to put up with just opening up a plastic pack of Tamiya, heaven forfend if you were stretching sprue to make antenna wire. It's just fucking polystyrene and that's the shit everyone thinks is toxic. There was a time when you bought a Prusa and were fucking done with it. Me? I bought a Prusa and was fucking done with it. I bought a Prusa because every camera house in LA prints their shit on a Prusa, and their shit is thrown into a box with $200k worth of glass and hauled out to the desert where it is not allowed to break. then everyone bought Bambu because all their talk about independence and makers and shit was a total fucking lie, they were all about the bottom line and they didn't give a single fuck that it all went through Chinese servers. And when all their printers turned on in the middle of the night and crashed they got what they deserved. Now everyone's all "zomg can Prusa ever catch up" because none of them print for any duration or any real use. It's all shit their wives don't want or need but can be justified by making low-poly napkin rings or some shit. Yeah and see if I sent a TPS report to my Epson and needed to soak it in a bag of nail polish before I could give it to my boss I wouldn't say nice things about Epson. "but I made it!" no one gives a fuck, Chad. "Makers" have been trying to make "3d-printed X" cool for fifteen fucking years now, fucking give up. It's a tool for rapid prototyping. I use it for rapid prototyping. You run into this with the jewelry community. "I spent over four hours piercing this piece with a jeweler's saw!" Great! You should probably be paying yourself about $70 an hour for survivability, can you sell that thing for $300? No? Well than let's call your hobby what it is then, shall we? Buddy of mine bought a skookum laser. He's making dog tags. He's got 'em down to 45 minutes of burn time each! yay! Except he accepted a contract for 100 of them which means he's looking at the better part of two work weeks sitting there swapping pieces out like a Vietnamese sweatshop. If that's really where you want your hobby to be, good on ya but as business models go, yours sucks. I wrote this over ten years ago. The difference between now and then is I'm probably 18,000 hours into 3d printing, two different kinds. Oh, and bulk ABS has come down by a factor of 3. TWO OTHER FUN FACTS FOR THE 3D PRINTED AVIATION COMMUNITY 1) There is no difference from a compression/tension/deformation standpoint between 25% infill and 100% infill. Carnegie Mellon ran the numbers you can look them up. I print nearly everything at 10% with 2-3 shells, gyroid fill. If it's a bracket that requires screwing things into it I run 25% gyroid with like 5 shells, which gives you enough material that you can print threads and tap. Which isn't nearly as strong as using threaded inserts but threaded inserts also like having 3-5 shells to gloop into. 2) you can make damn near anything fly through sheer power to weight BUT, that seems part of the fun.
To add to the above (most of which I wasn't aware of, so thanks): start out with TinkerCAD + PrusaSlicers. TinkerCAD is super easy to get started, but does allow for fairly precise building blocks. PrusaSlicer has a bit of a learning curve, but once you know there's almost nothing you need to change other than level of detail (nozzle setting) you should get pretty far on your own. I learned a bunch of printing wisdom from /r/fixmyprint, one wisdom of which is that given a seemingly simple problem there are always four different solutions proposed cuz overstimating internet users. But the good one is usually in there. With infrequent use of the printer, there's a good chance the nozzle will clog and your printer will not print a single good layer. There's a few YouTube videos on how to solve that, it looks hard but it's not that hard once you're comfortable opening up your printer head.
Messing around with TinkerCAD today and likely through the weekend as I get started. Thanks for the rec. Dipping my toes into electronics/soldering for the flight controls itself is the least interesting part of the long-term goal, mostly due to ignorance. This'll help alleviate some of it. r/fixmyprint seems a goldmine. Funny (and encouraging) seeing a few of y'all able to chime in on 3D-printing. Wasn't expecting it, but all-the-more excited for the gadget to arrive.
Any dipshit can learn to solder in 45 minutes. Any dipshit who knows how to solder can learn to do surface mount in 2 hours. Sincerely, some dipshit who has gone through four entire rolls of solder
If I can run a mini fleet of ender 3's, make useful stuff and not burn my house down, I'm confident you're capable of learning to run a 3d printer. Yes to everything kb and veen said. Anecdotally I buy my PLA and PETG in bulk for approx $10-11 per roll from a guy near me who bulk imports and resells the stuff. ( I don't actually know if he's still in business anymore with the whole once in a century trade war thing) No matter the brand I chuck it in a dry box full of dessicant beads for a while before I use it, no issues. Heated filament dryers are nice, I've never found I needed one since I got 4 Ikea samla boxes and filled them with dessicant beads and rolls of filament. I'm actually going to an additive manufacturing conference here in Metro Detroit in a few days, I'll report back with anything cool. PLA and PETG filament recycling is becoming a bigger and bigger deal as people come to terms with how much waste is involved with fdm printers. I save all my waste, segregated by plastic type with the long term end goal of grinding and re extruding it, eventually.
Burning the house down has been the concern for myself and my partner when looking up safety. Your vote of confidence is much appreciated, as a result. Not planning letting that print anything out of my sight. Please do. That sounds sweet. Noted on the recycling bit. If I can run a mini fleet of ender 3's, make useful stuff and not burn my house down, I'm confident you're capable of learning to run a 3d printer.
I'm actually going to an additive manufacturing conference here in Metro Detroit in a few days, I'll report back with anything cool.
I feel I should mention that I printed about 4kg worth of filament that a buddy had stored in his garage in a rubbermaid tub for six years. I think it was all PLA. This is in maritime Washington State, no climate control, stuff wasn't even in ziplocs. As a consequence I'm skeptical that moisture matters as much as has been implied. I do keep my filament in vacuum-evacuated ziplocks with a little desipack but that's the extent of my prevention. I think that formulation can be shit, and what people think is "moisture" is actually 'shit formulation' because they don't print enough. I, on the other hand, would buy 3 1kg rolls in the same lot, print one in two days, and then the second one would be garbage while the third one would be fine. Talkin' less than a week.