3D Printing

[52-80 19,381]

1.  What do you have

2.  What's the favorite thing you've made

3.  What's the most common type of things you make

4.  If you were to buy from scratch right now, what would you get?

 

I've been perusing the stuff off and on for a while, but it still seems too nascent and niche to have a consumer printer that's solid and foolproof, i.e. the Brother Laser Printer of plastics.  Is that about right?  Or is there really reliable stuff now?

[dieucla98 2,963]

I have a Crealty Ender 5 with a few modifications (bed support, new quiet control board, glass bed). For the price, I'm a big fan. Now that I've got it dialed in, it prints quite well - everything from random enclosures, to parts for an espresso machine, to Nintendo Switch controller holders, to those little wrenches you use to remove bike tires, etc...

That being said, no consumer 3d printer is going to be foolproof. There is a lot of trial and error whether that's playing around with bed temp, extruder temp, filament type, the actual design, fill rate, support structures, etc....

I've made a bunch of things with mine that I'm quite happy with. Probably the biggest achievement was using my 3d printer to build the parts that go into my Lowrider CNC machine.

It's a fun hobby. But you have to treat it as a hobby, not as a tool or office equipment. You will have prints that epically fail and you just have to edit and try again. If that doesn't sound fun, then save yourself the $300-$500 or whatever it is they go for these days. But when it all works as planned, it's pretty fucking cool.

[RDCanecutter 26,993]

This was my childhood foray into 3D printing, I mean, baking.

 

[BabaYaga 15,670]

On 1/18/2022 at 7:25 AM, 52-80 said:

What's the favorite thing you've made

[TwiceHorn 32,159]

I should really be all over this.  A variant was invented at UT while I was there.  I have written patents on it.

I'm a geek and a long time ago, I really enjoyed mechanical drawing (art for the artless, like me).

But, like a lot of technological things (raspberry pis, linux computers, etc.), I doubt I would end up making much use of it once the novelty wore off.

Maybe it goes back to why I didn't pursue an engineering career, per se.  I just don't have much creative inspiration.

[Captainant 28,634]

Bump. I just ordered a Bambu X1C and I'm super excited to get my hands on it! I did a bunch of 3D modeling while I was an engineering student so im hoping I can remember some of the solidworks tricks I used to know lol

[dieucla98 2,963]

Get some shit filament to learn on and then get the good stuff once you feel comfortable. Good filament makes a big difference.

[Captainant 28,634]

Bump. Got my Bambu X1C and it fucking RULES! I had a nearly perfect benchie 45 minutes after unboxing and setting it all up. Crazy fast self-calibration and bed autoleveling

 

Looking forward to making random shit and doodads, definitely gotta print a lightsaber for my nephew! 

[Captainant 28,634]

Yeah this thing fuckin RULES! I tried swinging for the fences and set up a 16hr print for this pretty big dice tower just to see how it'd do, and maybe get a fun thing to bring to D&D

Really really easy to use and get excellent results with. This print took 315 grams of PETG filament! From this thingiverse .stl

Edited April 11, 2023 by Captainant

[TwiceHorn 32,159]

So the dominant mode of layering these days is to melt a polymer filament using a three-axis print head?  And that seems to produce a reasonable material?

That's so much remarkably simpler than some of the early methods.  One of the crazier, but actually legit ones used a photopolymer masked with paper, lasers and/or knives operated on three axes trimmed away the paper mask and began to solidify the polymer, which was then hardened using UV light.  

And then there's UT's own Carl Deckard's, that used lasers on three axes to melt a pile of polymer particles into shapes.

[Captainant 28,634]

FDM is the filament melt like in the video above, and there's also very accessible SLA printing where you have a reservoir of UV-sensitive resin that you use a photomask to cure and it magically draws your item out of the liquid resin. You can get significantly better surface finishes with resin prints, to the point of them being indistinguishable from injection molded pieces. So instead of the paper and photopolymer mask as you're describing, it just uses a Texas Instruments DLP chip to project ultra-accurate light into the resin to cure it. But your choices of material are limited and you have to deal with all the sticky and VOC-filled resins, along with much more post-processing from washing and curing the pieces after printing is complete.

I'm very fortunate to have taken engineering drafting (as a mothafuckin study abroad in Austria!) with Dr. Wood at UT while I was still an engineering student - he was on some of the original patents for 3D printers and this thing that got shipped to my door would make his head explode lol

 

The print process is pretty straight forward: either make your own 3D model or just download one from thingiverse/thangs/whatever, drop it into your slicer program to generate any necessary supports and gcode for the print head pathing, and then send that gcode to your printer and hopefully you don't get hot spaghetti

Edited April 11, 2023 by Captainant

[TwiceHorn 32,159]

16 minutes ago, Captainant said:

FDM is the filament melt like in the video above, and there's also very accessible SLA printing where you have a reservoir of UV-sensitive resin that you use a photomask to cure and it magically draws your item out of the liquid resin. You can get significantly better surface finishes with resin prints, to the point of them being indistinguishable from injection molded pieces. So instead of the paper and photopolymer mask as you're describing, it just uses a Texas Instruments DLP chip to project ultra-accurate light into the resin to cure it. But your choices of material are limited and you have to deal with all the sticky and VOC-filled resins, along with much more post-processing from washing and curing the pieces after printing is complete.

I'm very fortunate to have taken engineering drafting (as a mothafuckin study abroad in Austria!) with Dr. Woods at UT while I was still an engineering student - he was on some of the original patents for 3D printers and this thing that got shipped to my door would make his head explode lol

 

The print process is pretty straight forward: either make your own 3D model or just download one from thingiverse/thangs/whatever, drop it into your slicer program to generate any necessary supports and gcode for the print head pathing, and then send that gcode to your printer and hopefully you don't get hot spaghetti

Is the SLA thing Israeli?  I have forgotten the names of the players, but the photopolymer thing came out of a company from Israel that originally tried to trademark "sterelithography," and this sounds like its descendant.

One I worked on used electrodeposition of nickel on charged surfaces.  Actually seemed pretty plausible, but never went anywhere.

Billy Wood?  Drafting at UT in the 80s was super chickenshit, just some three-view and dimensioning stuff in workbooks using graph paper.  The only CAD systems were CADAM on a S/360 and it was horrible.  I took two years of pencil/pen "mechanical drawing" in high school because I liked it so much and learned AutoCAD in the summers at TI.  Back then, they had processors in the monitors to do real-time pans and regens of big assembly drawings so as not to have to wait on the 8086 PCs.  The primary motivation for TI's adoption of CAD was not ease or speed of use, but drawing storage.

Edited April 11, 2023 by TwiceHorn

[Captainant 28,634]

10 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Billy Wood?

The very same! 

10 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Is the SLA thing Israeli?  I have forgotten the names of the players, but the photopolymer thing came out of a company from Israel that originally tried to trademark "sterelithography," and this sounds like its descendant.

The SLA thing is basically everyone but especially Chinese manufacturers like Elegoo and Creality - and they're only like $250 for an excellent resin printer! It's nuts.

There's a huge growth of novel printer designs, Creality put out a wild printer that has a belt for a print bed, and the print head is on a 45 degree axis relative to the print surface. It has an infinite Z axis to print with!

[horn4life 3,847]

On 4/10/2023 at 9:07 PM, Captainant said:

Yeah this thing fuckin RULES! I tried swinging for the fences and set up a 16hr print for this pretty big dice tower just to see how it'd do, and maybe get a fun thing to bring to D&D

 

Really really easy to use and get excellent results with. This print took 315 grams of PETG filament! From this thingiverse .stl

So how big is the market for Gnome and Fairy housing? 😉

[Mdhorn 6,167]

Read about AI architectural tech programs like Midjourney, which can design architectural and designer renderings from words.  The next step is hooking these up to a 3-D printer to create 3-D images/models, and not just flat pieces.   

Edit: Dammit--I see I'm way behind on the thread.  This is already happening. 

Edited April 14, 2023 by Mdhorn

[Captainant 28,634]

10 hours ago, Mdhorn said:

Read about AI architectural tech programs like Midjourney, which can design architectural and designer renderings from words.  The next step is hooking these up to a 3-D printer to create 3-D images/models, and not just flat pieces.   

Edit: Dammit--I see I'm way behind on the thread.  This is already happening. 

There's actually a one-click function in Fusion360 to apply some generative design techniques to optimize topologies for manufacturing (both additive and subtractive manufacturing) or material use reduction

https://www.autodesk.com/solutions/generative-design/manufacturing

And of COURSE someone has had chatGPT produce some 3D models and gcode, which people have printed. It's not very successful but the proof of concept is there

[Captainant 28,634]

A few more days of tinkering and I'm starting to figure out some cool tricks to help with support removal. Turns out, PETG and PLA have very poor layer adhesion thanks to chemical properties, so I can use the AMS to switch between the material for where the support touches the model. The end result is a very dimensionally stable model that's not too terrible to remove the supports from. The downside is it goes through a shitload of filament just purging one material to print the next. The model took 12grams of material, but the print used about 35g in total including all the purge cycles. Interesting interesting...

 

Starting to try printing some BattleTech minis, this is my first really nice looking print that still is in one piece after support removal. Mini pics in spoiler so I don't longcat. 

Spoiler

Bonus points if anyone can ID this mech

[Captainant 28,634]

Ok yeah multi material prints are pretty cool. Time to start looking for a nice .stl of the Tower

[Mdhorn 6,167]

14 hours ago, Captainant said:

A few more days of tinkering and I'm starting to figure out some cool tricks to help with support removal. Turns out, PETG and PLA have very poor layer adhesion thanks to chemical properties, so I can use the AMS to switch between the material for where the support touches the model. The end result is a very dimensionally stable model that's not too terrible to remove the supports from. The downside is it goes through a shitload of filament just purging one material to print the next. The model took 12grams of material, but the print used about 35g in total including all the purge cycles. Interesting interesting...

 

Starting to try printing some BattleTech minis, this is my first really nice looking print that still is in one piece after support removal. Mini pics in spoiler so I don't longcat. 

  Hide contents

Bonus points if anyone can ID this mech

Been awhile but I'll go with War Hammer, but hands may be different--more like guns.  

Edited April 19, 2023 by Mdhorn

[TwiceHorn 32,159]

On 4/10/2023 at 10:06 PM, Captainant said:

The very same! 

The SLA thing is basically everyone but especially Chinese manufacturers like Elegoo and Creality - and they're only like $250 for an excellent resin printer! It's nuts.

There's a huge growth of novel printer designs, Creality put out a wild printer that has a belt for a print bed, and the print head is on a 45 degree axis relative to the print surface. It has an infinite Z axis to print with!

I've been doing this long enough that I forget that about half of the patents I've ever worked on are expired, not including those expired prematurely via nonpayment of fees.  That Israeli outfit's initial patents probably expired 10 years ago.

[Captainant 28,634]

9 hours ago, Mdhorn said:

Been awhile but I'll go with War Hammer, but hands may be different--more like guns.  

Close, but I should print a Warhammer next now that you mention it...

Spoiler

It's a Battlemaster BLR-1G!

 

[Captainant 28,634]

Minor bump update to my 3D printing journey: I've settled on using PETG primarily since it doesn't put out any VOCs when printing, and my printer is in my office so that's that lol. Only challenge is that PETG is a much fussier material than PLA to get clean results with, and most of my prints have some blobbing and minor stringing.

I did some googling, and apparently I need to turn off the "slow down for overhangs" setting in my slicer and that'll fix it? Hope it'll work! Ive been trying to print Prusa's new rocket engine model and the print fails when it gets to the fine details on thin connections

edit: that did it, plus some cooling fan tuning!

 

 

Edited April 27, 2023 by Captainant

[Captainant 28,634]

Just picked up the CMYK lithoplane bundle to make some gifts from ranch photos, really excited to try out this new technique 

[Captainant 28,634]

Bump - still loving having my X1C! A few weeks ago I had a cheapo corner shelf from target that I use in my half bath for handsoap get all cracked and water damaged. So I grabbed my calipers, my personal copy of Fusion360, and CADed up a new one that filled exactly half the build plate lol. Really happy with the end product that's in my bathroom now - it's definitely more waterproof than the old one!

I'm currently printing some espresso and coffee organizers that'll tidy up my coffee area - it's really nice to just find or slightly modify a public project that fits EXACTLY RIGHT, rather than shopping through a bunch of not-quite-right products 

Edited July 13, 2023 by Captainant

[NotActuallyALonghorn 5,006]

On 4/18/2023 at 8:42 AM, Captainant said:

A few more days of tinkering and I'm starting to figure out some cool tricks to help with support removal. Turns out, PETG and PLA have very poor layer adhesion thanks to chemical properties, so I can use the AMS to switch between the material for where the support touches the model. The end result is a very dimensionally stable model that's not too terrible to remove the supports from. The downside is it goes through a shitload of filament just purging one material to print the next. The model took 12grams of material, but the print used about 35g in total including all the purge cycles. Interesting interesting...

 

Starting to try printing some BattleTech minis, this is my first really nice looking print that still is in one piece after support removal. Mini pics in spoiler so I don't longcat. 

  Reveal hidden contents

Bonus points if anyone can ID this mech

Technical question here: do they not have specialty versions of these plastics that will allow stuff like PLA to adhere to PETG? I only ask because chemically modifying plastics to allow them to adhere to dissimilar plastics is pretty much what I do for a living.

[Captainant 28,634]

54 minutes ago, NotActuallyALonghorn said:

Technical question here: do they not have specialty versions of these plastics that will allow stuff like PLA to adhere to PETG? I only ask because chemically modifying plastics to allow them to adhere to dissimilar plastics is pretty much what I do for a living.

Honestly, the simplicity and consistency of a filament is what makes is most useful in printing. I've messed with a PETG that had a speckled appearance and I've had a ton of challenges getting consistent results with it, but the plain single color filament print beautifully and predictably. 

Plus, its neat to exploit some different chemical properties to get better dimensional results - you can get perfectly supported overhangs with zero surface marring on the bottom side at the cost of 10 or so grams of wasted material. But if you print many more of the same item with the same filament swaps at the same layers, you reduce the overall amount of waste since it spreads it across more items.

 

That said - any good consumer superglue recommendations for making PETG stuff stick to PLA and $(othermaterial)?

[NotActuallyALonghorn 5,006]

I deal with stuff at a raw materials level more so than a consumer level. Mostly it's stuff like making a PE resin with specific properties in order to allow it to adhere to dissimilar resins (like PP or something else) at a molecular level. So like if you wanted to blow a film with a layer that has heat shrink properties and a layer that has UV resistance or an O2 barrier or something, you could either throw a layer of what I make in between or mix some of it in with one of your base resins depending on the application and your final product wouldn't have layers that want to separate. But I'm usually told to make something particular and not always filled in on the end application of whatever it is I'm doing.

[RDCanecutter 26,993]

On 7/13/2023 at 3:53 PM, Captainant said:

Bump - still loving having my X1C! A few weeks ago I had a cheapo corner shelf from target that I use in my half bath for handsoap get all cracked and water damaged. So I grabbed my calipers, my personal copy of Fusion360, and CADed up a new one that filled exactly half the build plate lol. Really happy with the end product that's in my bathroom now - it's definitely more waterproof than the old one!

I'm currently printing some espresso and coffee organizers that'll tidy up my coffee area - it's really nice to just find or slightly modify a public project that fits EXACTLY RIGHT, rather than shopping through a bunch of not-quite-right products 

You need to print up some plastic monster turds to throw in that toilet for whenever your wife invites decent folk over.

[Captainant 28,634]

Bump - working on printing up a big board game project called Hextraction. Lotta print time to get through....

 

Also, Bambu just announced a new entry level printer that gives you a 180 mm^3 build volume and an AMS unit for $450! Nobody's gotten hands-on with it yet, but if it has all the same autocalibration and fine tuning that my X1C has it's gonna be one heck of a "first printer" for a lot of folks

Edited September 20, 2023 by Captainant

[Captainant 28,634]

Just a followup - the new A1 mini from bambulab seems like a screaming deal if you're looking to get into 3D printing

Multi-material, active noise tuning, input shaping, super high speed, and super low maintenance all at $460 ain't bad. It can't print ABS and some more challenging engineering materials, but if you're looking to get into the hobby, this is where I'd start

[Captainant 28,634]

Having fun printing off a couple gameday things for my niece and nephew 🤘

[Mdhorn 6,167]

I've seen some mockups of 3d printers that could be used by patients to create their own artificial limbs as well as maintenance parts.  And because the printers are cheap, they could print from home. 

[Captainant 28,634]

7 minutes ago, Mdhorn said:

I've seen some mockups of 3d printers that could be used by patients to create their own artificial limbs as well as maintenance parts.  And because the printers are cheap, they could print from home. 

In that space - a company has tech that uses photogrammetry and some felt marker witness marks on an arm to generate a printable cast

https://www.activarmor.com/

Really cool synthesis of several techniques

[Mdhorn 6,167]

15 minutes ago, Captainant said:

In that space - a company has tech that uses photogrammetry and some felt marker witness marks on an arm to generate a printable cast

https://www.activarmor.com/

Really cool synthesis of several techniques

Wonder if these will be like dental guards for teeth grinding that seem similar to a sports mouthpiece but cost almost 400 dollars.  

But that is pretty cool, and we could start seeing it in sports more and more real soon.  Also, how cool would it have been if when you were a kid, you could make your own damn toys.   
 

Edited October 16, 2023 by Mdhorn

[Heisenberg 162]

I'm looking for someone to scan/model/print an axle/brake disk guard from a 40 year old Honda.  The item is about 6.75 inches by 2.75 inches by 1.5 inches overall and is about 1/8-5/32 inches thick.  It is molded from hard black plastic with some flexibility.  It has shrunken over time and cracked around its 2 mounting screw holes.  The item is not subjected to flexing when mounted and in use, but it is subjected to engine and road vibration.  The item is not subjected to any engine or other high temperatures, but is subjected to our high summertime air temperatures in its mounting position 1 foot above black asphalt roads.  Only the outer surface shown in the 4th/last photo is visible when mounted.

If this is something you would take on (for cash) please let me know.  Or if you know of someone who could do this job I'd appreciate a reference.

Edited December 26, 2023 by Heisenberg

[52-80 19,381]

On 1/20/2022 at 5:57 PM, dieucla98 said:

I have a Crealty Ender 5 with a few modifications (bed support, new quiet control board, glass bed). For the price, I'm a big fan. Now that I've got it dialed in, it prints quite well - everything from random enclosures, to parts for an espresso machine, to Nintendo Switch controller holders, to those little wrenches you use to remove bike tires, etc...

That being said, no consumer 3d printer is going to be foolproof. There is a lot of trial and error whether that's playing around with bed temp, extruder temp, filament type, the actual design, fill rate, support structures, etc....

I've made a bunch of things with mine that I'm quite happy with. Probably the biggest achievement was using my 3d printer to build the parts that go into my Lowrider CNC machine.

It's a fun hobby. But you have to treat it as a hobby, not as a tool or office equipment. You will have prints that epically fail and you just have to edit and try again. If that doesn't sound fun, then save yourself the $300-$500 or whatever it is they go for these days. But when it all works as planned, it's pretty fucking cool.

Are you still playing around with it 2 years on?

I think ive found enough use cases for wanting one: bike accessories, coffee accessories, toys for my kiddo, various organizers for the office and around the house like screwdriver holders.

Also found a product/company I want to support.  Prusa Research started by 1 young guy out of Prague, grew enough to verticalize the whole supply chain, makes everything in house, all products are modular, scaleable, open-source, etc.  Can get a Mini+ kit for around 500. 

[Captainant 28,634]

55 minutes ago, 52-80 said:

Also found a product/company I want to support.  Prusa Research started by 1 young guy out of Prague, grew enough to verticalize the whole supply chain, makes everything in house, all products are modular, scaleable, open-source, etc.  Can get a Mini+ kit for around 500. 

Prusa is the OG and definitely a company worth supporting, but at $500 you get a ton more features and functionality and SPEED with the Bambu A1 mini compared the Prusa Mini. 

But if you're looking to have and tinker the 3D printer as the hobby, rather than just printing a bunch, the Prusa units are the best in class. You'll learn a ton and the completely open platform means you can upgrade stuff pretty easily along the way. 

But you'll also probably be spending as much time getting the printer happy and ready for prints, as you are actually printing

[Captainant 28,634]

In terms of prints, I've made a few functional prints to replace broken bits and greeblies around the house, recently printed and painted a mini from HeroForge (the .2mm nozzle is pretty pretty good) for a D&D game I'm in, and just started printing some stuff in 95A TPU. My sister (no pics) was in town for me and my wife's baby shower last weekend and I'm sending her home with a couple of mini airless basketballs printed in TPU. 

Turns out they don't bounce much because the TPU more absorbs than reflects bounces, but they're still fun super durable toys for her kiddos. 

I'm super excited to have my printer handy for all the little bits and bobs that you find yourself needing when you're expecting a little one in the house. Been trying to find some good childproofing latches for cabinets and whatnot, the markup on those is INSANE and I can print each one at like $0.50 of material each lol

Edited March 25 by Captainant

[dieucla98 2,963]

21 hours ago, 52-80 said:

Are you still playing around with it 2 years on?

I think ive found enough use cases for wanting one: bike accessories, coffee accessories, toys for my kiddo, various organizers for the office and around the house like screwdriver holders.

Also found a product/company I want to support.  Prusa Research started by 1 young guy out of Prague, grew enough to verticalize the whole supply chain, makes everything in house, all products are modular, scaleable, open-source, etc.  Can get a Mini+ kit for around 500. 

It ended up sitting around and I gave it to a friend who wanted to dabble. Not anything the fault of the printer or the hobby, just was pulled in too many directions to play around with it. I may get back into it again. 

[Captainant 28,634]

Bump - with a baby now there's all sorts of organizers and things that are hard to find that are just right. I spent a couple hours over the weekend a CAD'ed up a little 9 bottle organizer for our clean and ready to use baby bottles. Took about 9 hours to print and used about 460gr of PETG ($10 in material, effectively)

https://www.printables.com/model/979584-baby-bottle-caddy

[52-80 19,381]

On 4/3/2022 at 1:32 AM, TwiceHorn said:

But, like a lot of technological things (raspberry pis, linux computers, etc.), I doubt I would end up making much use of it once the novelty wore off.

I expected this to happen but ive already run through 5 spools of filament and steadily printing more. 

A few things are functional household items like workshop organizers and etc, but most are toys for the little ones in my family: sandcastle molds, model cars, spinning tops, boomerangs, spirographs, articulating figurines, and neat stuff like these surprise eggs

most of these work really well, but you also learn the limitations of the materials and process.

an unexpected outcome out of all of this is an appreciation for high volume industrial manufacturing. when im looking at my kids hot wheels-sized car thats made out of 4 types of plastics in different colors and finishes and has metal axles and rubber tires that all fits perfectly and survives being stomped on and abandoned in the backyard through multiple winters and costs all of $1 to purchase…in which contains profit for the seller, the distributor, the manufacturer, and everyone in between, its tantamount to a fucking miracle. 

[52-80 19,381]

Real example my niece just got into super mario bros because of the movie, and started grade school this year, so i printed her this pencil holder. 

[Captainant 28,634]

7 hours ago, 52-80 said:

Real example my niece just got into super mario bros because of the movie, and started grade school this year, so i printed her this pencil holder. 

You should check your belt tension, that may help with some of the banding artifacts you're seeing. That's a nice print though! What are you using, a prusa?

[Zone Read 300]

I got my Bambu A1 a few months ago, here are a couple of the UT related things I've printed for personal use.  I make little miniatures versions of the Tower lit up with the #1 and give them to kids at home games.  It's a fun hobby, very time consuming but I'm retired, so I've got time.

[52-80 19,381]

On 10/29/2024 at 5:10 AM, Zone Read said:

I got my Bambu A1 a few months ago, here are a couple of the UT related things I've printed for personal use.  I make little miniatures versions of the Tower lit up with the #1 and give them to kids at home games.  It's a fun hobby, very time consuming but I'm retired, so I've got time.

 

 

thats dope shit.  where are you getting the models from?  ive got orange filament right now, and been printing a ton of halloween related decorations and accessories

[Dbeasy 15,619]

On 4/10/2023 at 9:51 PM, TwiceHorn said:

Is the SLA thing Israeli?  I have forgotten the names of the players, but the photopolymer thing came out of a company from Israel that originally tried to trademark "sterelithography," and this sounds like its descendant.

One I worked on used electrodeposition of nickel on charged surfaces.  Actually seemed pretty plausible, but never went anywhere.

Billy Wood?  Drafting at UT in the 80s was super chickenshit, just some three-view and dimensioning stuff in workbooks using graph paper.  The only CAD systems were CADAM on a S/360 and it was horrible.  I took two years of pencil/pen "mechanical drawing" in high school because I liked it so much and learned AutoCAD in the summers at TI.  Back then, they had processors in the monitors to do real-time pans and regens of big assembly drawings so as not to have to wait on the 8086 PCs.  The primary motivation for TI's adoption of CAD was not ease or speed of use, but drawing storage.

Holy shit he was my drafting professor. How do you guys remember something so far back? I think I learned Solidworks at my engineering side job, which worked with NASTRAN finite element modeling software. 3D was just coming into vogue and I remember struggling to draw with it. 

[BabaYaga 15,670]

On 10/28/2024 at 11:10 PM, Zone Read said:

I got my Bambu A1 a few months ago, here are a couple of the UT related things I've printed for personal use.  I make little miniatures versions of the Tower lit up with the #1 and give them to kids at home games.  It's a fun hobby, very time consuming but I'm retired, so I've got time.

So you can print, anything?  Asking for a friend....

 

[NotActuallyALonghorn 5,006]

I've got a $600 gift card to Amazon, and am looking to get a printer. I want something that can print in CF Nylon filament eventually. Looking at the R Qidi X-Plus 3 for the size of the bed and it's capabilities, but I'm open to suggestions. 

[Captainant 28,634]

9 hours ago, NotActuallyALonghorn said:

I've got a $600 gift card to Amazon, and am looking to get a printer. I want something that can print in CF Nylon filament eventually. Looking at the R Qidi X-Plus 3 for the size of the bed and it's capabilities, but I'm open to suggestions. 

$600 to be able to print CF nylon with a heated chamber is pretty hard to beat. One thing to consider is that Nylon, ABS, and a few other materials off gas VOC's when heated for printing, so be sure to have excellent ventilation or not set it up where people tend to be. 

I found a pretty thorough review of that printer, and it looks like it'll be a solid prototyping machine. 

https://www.3dsourced.com/3d-printer-reviews/qidi-tech-x-plus-3-review/

Do you have much experience with FDM 3D printing?

[TwiceHorn 32,159]

On 10/30/2024 at 4:46 AM, Dbeasy said:

Holy shit he was my drafting professor. How do you guys remember something so far back? I think I learned Solidworks at my engineering side job, which worked with NASTRAN finite element modeling software. 3D was just coming into vogue and I remember struggling to draw with it. 

Mine was Charles Perkins.  Wood was head of engineering graphics back then, which assumed a larger role as CAD came into play.

In our pre-project class, we had to use NASTRAN on a VAX and you had to enter the material data in a "comma matrix" form for each element of the structure.  It was horribad just from a data entry/error standpoint.  You'd submit your model to the processor in a batch-processing mode and then watch it complete or error out.  Lotsa "fuuuuuuucks" and "yessss" while watching that.