dual_sport_dork

I had the extruder in my Qidi apart just last night because I had the tip of a piece of ABS snap off inside during a filament change. I found a bunch of dust presumably from various instances of filament grinding from the last few months, probably due to e.g. running the hotend at the wrong temperature for the filament due to being a dummy. It happens occasionally.

It’s not too tough to access on my machine but one of these years I will remember that you need to drop the heater block assembly out first, and then remove the gear cover. Just… not this time.

You really don’t need to worry about it. Said list exists only within the tiny padded cell that is the Tesseract client. If you are not using it, and no one you are interacting with is using it, it doesn’t affect anything or anyone. That’s part of what makes this so hilarious.

Now that the cat is out of the bag I suspect that Tesseract is being used by a vanishingly small number of people.

Apparently several people have gotten themselves added since the initial reveal of the list by deliberately razzing Mr. Patrick via private message, among other things. I imagine he is also running automated scraping tools to seek out people for his self-styled version of “non-normie” behavior (i.e. keywords) to block as well.

Well, we’ve all got to hang around somewhere.

An alternative frontend for Lemmy. Its developer has a track history of being rather unhinged, and has recently become even more unhinged. He apparently feels that it is his job to police the content on all of Lemmy according to his own whims, and was recently caught secretly inserting a long and complex list of content filters and user blocks into his client as well as pushing purposefully misleading error messages within his app to obfuscate this behavior. The explicit bans of specific users has attracted the most attention and amusement from the community writ large, in particular from the people who are banned. Note of course that this list happens to contain yours truly, for truly unfathomable reasons.

In the meantime, 0.065" trimmer line is fifteen bucks for half a kilo, in an interesting array of neon colors and strange cross sectional shapes that may or may not play nice in your extruder gears. Some adjustment of your extrusion multiplier is surely in order (0.065" is a shade under 1.75mm, at 1.651).

Obligatory CNC Kitchen article: www.cnckitchen.com/blog/3d-printing-trimmer-line

That seems like one of those things that ought to be inherently contradictory, but I’ll be interested to hear how it goes. Note that fiber fillings in a material inherently reduce its layer adhesion strength, so your formerly stellar adhesion may not be anymore with the inclusion of the glass fiber. It’ll also make your flexible TPU a lot less flexible. This mitigates the two major advantages of TPU, which leads me to wonder if it’s even worthwhile. But still, give it a go. For science!

Don’t forget to get a hardened steel or gemstone nozzle, otherwise you’ll destroy your brass nozzle in very short order printing with fiber filled materials.

Note that while people conflate the two and use the terms interchangeably, leveling and setting your Z offset are not necessarily the same thing.

Leveling the bed is a process to ensure that it is square (“trammed,” in many peoples’ parlance) and flat relative to the travel of the print head, preferably at all points on its surface. This may or may not also entail setting your printer’s Z offset as part of the process depending on how its inbuilt process works, or whether or not you so it manually.

Z offset adjustment is ensuring that the starting position for your printer’s nozzle is the correct distance from the build plate on its first layer. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with ensuring that this value is the same everywhere across the build plate.

You should make sure your build plate is level relative to the nozzle first, then mess around with Z offset heights. Theoretically you should only have to level the plate once, unless something works itself loose or some other mechanical issue presents itself. Your Z offset, however, should be adjusted between prints every time you switch from materials that require one temperature versus another either on the plate or the nozzle itself.

On my machine, a Qidi X-Max 3 running Klipper, I can directly twiddle the Z offset from the printer’s touch screen while printing, or at any time in the console via the Mainsale interface which is accessible via web browser over the network. I have a test print that’s just a 0.2mm thick rectangle I use to assess the correct-ish Z offset, since I can observe it while it prints and diddle with the Z offset setting as it goes until it looks right to me. Since it’s only 0.2mm tall, the generated print will automatically be only one layer thick. I then use that value going forward for whatever that temperature/material is. My printer has a built in routine that allegedly assists you in setting the Z offset but I’ve found that it’s functionally worthless and also much more of a hassle.

Because I’m lazy, I then created a bunch of Klipper macros that do nothing but set the Z offset to one of my figured out values, one each for each material and also for either side of my plate (textured on one side, smooth on the other). To switch offset values I just hit one of those macros from the list in the Mainsail console and it’s done. That way I don’t have to keep a Post-It note or something around with each temperature/material’s Z offset value, nor remember them.

If you’re switching between a flat and textured plate, or the flat and textured sides of your plate, you’ll also have to make a Z offset adjustment. Your nozzle has to be closer to the plate on the textured side to ensure the extruded material makes it all the way down into the valleys in the textured surface. If your printer has a bed probe it will only sense the very top of the textured surface, which probably has a depth of 0.15mm or more all by itself which is nearly the entire thickness of a print layer to begin with.

I think it’s a sound theory then, that your nozzle scraped the surface off of your build plate. Both the plate and nozzle are now probably roached. On the bright size, nozzles are cheap. The plate, less so.

I have learned not to allow my printer to auto-level with every single print. It’s just as likely as not to get it wrong, and unless you have major league mechanical issues the relationship between your plate and nozzle should not be changing from print to print except when you change temperatures. You should be able to generate one Z offset preset per temperature combination and use it repeatedly until you make some other mechanical change to the printer such as replacing the nozzle or replacing the build plate.

Also watch out for having debris trapped underneath the steel build plate and its magnetic base, which will cause nozzle crash issues. Scraps of black filament are the classic way this happens, since they’re functionally invisible in poor light against the black magnetic surface.

Are you sure you didn’t scrape your nozzle against the plate the whole way? I’m looking at those long diagonal lines there that appear to be travel moves.

You will have to adjust your Z offset every time you print at a different build plate temperature or appreciably different nozzle temperature, because thermal expansion will cause the plate and nozzle to grow in size slightly the hotter they get and that will take up some or in extreme cases all of the gap.

I have a different set of Z offset presets for every material I print with, because the temperatures are all different.

I’m going to go ahead and point out that this was literally the original intent of the NFA: It was implicitly to disarm black folks, with the expectation that rich white people would be able to afford to remain armed. It was also meant to apply to all concealable firearms in general, i.e. pistols, which is why there is so much malarkey in there around short barrelled rifles and shotguns and so forth.

A populace full of well-fed, financially secure, educated and literate, and medically cared for people is significantly less likely to go around shooting each other than the clusterfuck we’ve got going on now. Violence, gun related or otherwise, doesn’t just happen in a vacuum.

Please don’t, the plastic will almost certainly break after just 1 shot.

Citation needed.

Yeah, I have no idea what’s up with that. The first time I didn’t think anything of it, the second time I thought it was an odd fluke, the third time I was looking at it quite askance, and the fourth time was with a spool of red ABS rather than PLA which did the same damn thing despite three other spools of other colors from not only the same brand but even the same package (it was a 4x250g sampler pack) and that made me mighty suspicious.

It’s still usable if you handle it carefully, but the end of the filament tends to snap off in storage or during handling, i.e. when loading and unloading it from the printer. Cooking it in the filament dryer doesn’t seem to result in much of a change on that front, either. I have no idea how this affects the final mechanical properties of the printed part, but I’ll bet you a dime it won’t be a positive impact.

Yes. If I absolutely must use a fiber filled material, I prefer glass fiber rather than carbon. A fiber fill in your filament reduces shrink and warping and increases rigidity, and makes some tough-to-use polymers more printable such as Nylon. However, the above is correct in that it reduces tensile strength and especially layer adhesion strength, i.e. tensile strength along your Z axis. (Plus, carbon fiber fills basically always limit your color selections to black, black, and black.)

If you need mechanical strength of some type or another, it’s almost always a better idea to use a non-filled filament in a more suitable material and work on modifying your printer or getting a better printer that’s capable of printing that material. I can do straight polycarbonate in my machine with a pretty high degree of success (other than very small parts, I’m finding) so in all honesty I don’t have much use for fiber filled filaments anyway.

You can generally trust dodgy rolls of ordinary PLA. For anything with special properties like sparklies, purported fiber fills, a metallic sheen, etc. all bets are off. You are equally likely to just find yourself with a spool chock-a-block full of randomly sized nozzle clogging particles of who knows what, or a roll of what turns out to be perfectly ordinary boring PLA and a set of product photos with a high degree of Photoshop polish.

I likewise don’t trust knockoff spools of engineering materials like Nylon, polycarb, etc. at all. Food for thought: Polycarbonate at PET in their natural states are both startlingly transparent, both are bendy-bendy, both have near identical melting points, and are equally annoying to print. PET is significantly cheaper than polycarbonate, though. So guess how easy it would be to spool up 1 kg of PET, slap a label on it that says “polycarbonate,” and sell it to the unwashed masses who are by majority unlikely to actually whack any test samples of the stuff with a hammer? Et. cetera.

So it is likely to be with purported PLA blends like “tough” PLA or “pro” PLA or “plus” PLA from the no-name brigade. These are often just regular PLA with a 30% markup.

Never forget the time honored Chinese pastime: 能骗就骗.

And this is going to sound stupid, but specifically beware of spools of nameless red filament. I don’t know if it has something to do with the pigment they use or what, but the only spools of any material I have consistently had embrittlement issues with have all been red.

X-Max 3 gang! I have one of those too. I’m only mildly annoyed that they didn’t extend support for their filament changer to it, but that didn’t exist at the time I bought mine so it’s not like I was expecting in-machine multimaterial support anyhow.

I have had to replace the heat bed in mine when the thermistor in it failed, and that is not a separately removable part. I also had to replace the larger of the two fans in the print head, the latter of which was like $2 from China. The heat bed was a little more expensive, a over $100 as I recall. I’m not too broken up about it — I do a lot of printing with my machine, even moreso now that I’m using it for my dinkum hobby business.

I had an OG X-Plus before that which was also quite dependable and needed nothing during my ownership other than replacing worn out nozzles. I gave it to a friend of mine and it’s still running strong.

The upper reciever is the load bearing part on an Armalite, but it’s also not the regulated part. The lower receiver is, and all you need for that is a box that holds the trigger components in vaguely the right place, a hole that lines up the magazine, a hole to stick the buffer tube into at the back, and some way to nail the upper receiver to it.

You could carve an AR lower out of wood if you were dedicated enough.

Side rant: It’s annoying how the first thing EVERYONE says when seeing your prints is that “you could sell these!!”

Yeah, let me tell you about selling your own prints. Let me tell you all about that. There is way more complication and many more moving parts than anyone expects at first glance. Or, even, after a good second look.

Everybody thinks you need to find a way to monetize all your hobbies now. It’s “HuStLe cUlTuRe!!!” You have to make your own decision on that point. Do it because you want to, not because you expect to make any kind of money at it.

I’m doing it because I want to. You couldn’t stop me, even with a wall.

I’m not 100% certain. Possibly the Brownell’s BRN-180, although I haven’t handled one personally to see if the endstop block it comes with relies on the rigidity of the buffer tube ring to stop the bolt carrier or if it attaches to the rest of the upper itself in some way. The recoil springs are entirely captive and attached to it, at least.

I suppose you could also just reinforce the shit out of that area in your design if you knew you didn’t need to have a big hole through it.

It should be totally possible to whittle a functional AR-15 lower. Especially if you wanted to mate it to one of those fancy new bufferless uppers, so you wouldn’t even have to worry about the stock and buffer tube.

Both of my Qidi machines have been plug in, load filament, and print. My current X-Max 3 also provided a rather polished out of the box experience with an on-screen guide and everything. I would much rather have a Qidi than any Bambu machine at this point.

I’m a little disappointed that they’ve apparently recently abandoned their homegrown fork of Prusa Slicer in favor of a home grown fork of Bambu’s slicer, but here’s hoping Bambu’s current litigious fuckery will cause them to rethink that strategy. Still, their stuff is open source enough that there’s nothing stopping me from using any other slicer with it if I felt like it. Or, indeed, any other firmware.

Agreed. I’ve got two bird feeders made out of the stuff just cooking away in the sun year round and they’ve been fine.

Yes. And I suspect due to its low temperature resistance (this an intuitive guess; I’m not exactly a materials science engineer) it also exhibits very poor cold creep/permanent deflection characteristics. ABS is actually the best of the bunch there, probably hand in hand with ASA.

However, one thing people are often surprised to learn or discover about boring old PLA is that it actually has among the highest layer adhesion strength of the commonly available materials, I believe second only to polycarbonate, and it’s also the most rigid of the commonly available (non-filled) materials. At least at room temperature, anyway. It turns out that printing the screws for e.g. my Rockhopper or Adélie in anything but PLA amounts to being a fool’s errand.

It’s tempting to think of the litany of plastics available in filament form to consumers as a simple linear and escalating spectrum with “cheap, flimsy, easy to print” and one end and “expensive, strong, difficult to print” at the other. In reality as you know it’s not quite so simple. If anything, the hypothetical graph describing the properties of PLA, PETG, PET, ABS, ASA, Nylon, polycarbonate, etc. would have to be three dimensional.

That’s because everyone starts with PLA, and PLA has the lowest shrink and warp of all commonly available materials… which is why it’s so common and everyone starts with PLA.

Basically anything is going to warp more and compare poorly against PLA, but ASA’s shrinkage after cooling is less than half of ABS, so it compares favorably to ABS in particular. 1.6% vs 0.7% or something similar. PLA’s shrink rate, meanwhile, can be as low as 0.3% for competently manufactured blends. Shrinking while cooling is what causes warp, especially on broad flat objects.

ASA is the go-to answer. You could also try filled ABS or ASA, either glass fiber or carbon fiber. The fibers do not make it any stronger per se, but they do mitigate shrink and warp to a large degree. If you do so, use a hardened steel or gemstone nozzle.

PETG may also be suitable for some applications.

Well, I guess if I ever move to Italy I’ll be screwed…