Things I would like to 3D print
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jmtd.net
I bought a printer for my kids this year. An Anycubic Mega Zero with a magnetic base.
It stays pretty calibrated but I have struggled with base adhesion once a few prints have been through it. IPA and abrasives have not fixed it...maybe I will get around to some other things...there have been a few random failures, but not many.
We printed a few novelties items that came out OK. The real learning curve is about the options in the slicer, the trade off between printing time and accuracy etc.
At some stage my kids printed some toy guns. Apparently one of those toys looked real to the phone engineer, the only person who had been in my house over lockdown. Later there was a knock on my door whereupon 4 police officers arrested me and began to search my house for 'section 1 prohibited firearms'. Just as officer 1 finished telling me this, the plastic gun was found. Officer 1 proceeded to give me a ticking off about the dangers of realistic models...while officers 2-4 marvelled at the 3d printer, much to the annoyance of officer 1. Officer 2 asked me if I had tried realistic finishing like with rub n buff, and got chatting about Adam Savage. I had to get a steam punk top hat I made with foam to demonstrate rub n buff to the others. This annoyed Officer 1 enough that he decided it was time to go! I am not quite sure whether I find the episode funny or not. It was pretty scary to begin with.
I actually haven't found anything I wanted to print for a while. I make a lot of things but 3d printing is not always the best tool for the job.
Another cheaper option is G10 or FR4. I've got copper backed FR4 on my list of things to try. Apparently it has a more even heating due to he copper against the heated bed. I've been using the glass held on with Binder clips until recently when a few binders popped off and tossed the whole lot on the floor of my garage sending shards everywhere.
Couple things that comes off my head that caused my “adhesion problems” over past years were incorrect Z=0 height, uneven bed, rigidity issue on moving bed, and worn out nozzle. Worn out nozzle is easy to spot, if your extruded material curls up before dropping down, that nozzle is done.
It had been more often an excessive or uneven force forcing print to depart from bed, than print simply detaching for lack of reasonable adhesion.
Also, a last-resort workaround is to put the model in the air so first 5mm(1/4”) or more is just supports. Support material is more tolerant and top of it is naturally more flat and parallel. Downside is that the bottom of the print looks just bad.
Anyway, a heated bed is much more impactful than the bed surface. Glass at 60°C alone is enough for PLA (with glue it adheres too well and stops working again), while you will need both a heated bed and surface covering for ABS.
Also, any PVA based glue works. If you dissolve some white glue and spread it through the glass, it works even better than solid glue, but it's much more work.
I had a dishwasher engineer fit a replacement plastic piece where you put the tablet; a quote for an oven engineer to replace the glass door.
That sort of ridiculousness makes me more sympathetic to bonafide tradesmen using the term (or rather having it used about them by customer services) - boiler engineers, ISPs' 'engineer visit' to set up a new line, etc. - despite that probably being what started my peeve initially!
I don't know how widespread it is, I know in Germany for example it's a protected term. In Canada I think if unqualified (i.e. not 'software engineer' or 'boiler engineer', but just 'Engineer') it is too. We have chartered institutions that can bestow 'CEng', but it doesn't affect whether or not you're allowed to be called 'an engineer' or anything.
(This whole comment probably makes it sound like I'm a lot more annoyed by it than I am.. I just mean it's sort of 'heh ok sure' chuckle/eyeroll when they say it. Like if it started to be normal to refer to pharmacists/nurses/phlebotomists as 'dispensing/assisting/blood-taking doctors' I suppose.)
An engineer may drive a train or maintain ships propulsion in the English speaking world.
A Civil Engineering company builds roads and bridges, and may not have any Chartered Engineers on the staff.
I know several people who design electronics for a living, have degrees in the same subject and call themselves 'Electronic Engineer', yet becoming CEng would never cross their mind. Whereas if you wanted to become a structural engineer you would likely have to become chartered.
I have never met a Chartered network engineer, yet what else would a CCNA call themselves?
Never mind the software engineers and Devops engineers...
Perhaps the Chartered Engineers should have found their own term rather than adopt a general one and then get sniffy about other uses? I know the Chartered Institutes have been around a long time but the term 'Engineer' predates them by some years.
Fwiw I'm not CEng, EE by degree, but work in SE. I'd like the IET & chartership to be more relevant for SE, but all I meant by that was that we have it, but don't (as some other countries do) require it or something like it in order to use the term 'engineer'.
No. Fight the American default!
3D printers really aren't good toys in and of themselves. They're fun for a little while and then you realize you don't need that many plastic doodads. But mine's been very useful for certain projects where I need to build custom parts. People sometimes forget that these printers are just tools like anything else. Fortunately they've become so cheap that it's not really that much of an expense to find that out for one's self.
EDIT: Seriously, anyone with adhesion problems should get a PEI plate. I have had nothing but success with mine and I don't know why these printers don't just come with them in the first place.
I think I would get more use out of it if I acquired some basic CAD skills!
This isn't to say that you can't take the time to learn more standard CAD software, but for what I'm doing I haven't had the time for that and I imagine you probably don't either. After a few hours of learning OpenSCAD and reading the cheat sheet, a whole world of possibilities was opened to me.
I agree about FreeCAD, lacks a lot of polish, but there's a big update coming from it seems basically one maintainer that looks pretty promising. I found it looking for a way to save in a git-sane format (which this branch/fork has). Main problem with Fusion360 (for me) is the lack of Linux support.
My assumption is that it and other standard CAD packages would have a greater learning curve for a programmer who mostly wants to print simple but custom objects. Granted, I have a background in non-CAD 3D, but OpenSCAD was incredibly fast for me to pick up not just because it relies purely on code but that it eliminates a lot of concepts that you are forced to learn otherwise.
In OpenSCAD, there are no units (though STLs seem to come out in millimeters), no object hierarchies, no sketches, no key combos, etc. All you have is code, in a domain-specific language, that describes what is being built. This can be difficult or unappealing, especially for someone who isn't a full-time programmer, but it can also be freeing to just deal with code and not have other things potentially get in the way or cause confusion.
Of course OpenSCAD probably doesn't scale the more complicated a project gets. But for Arduino/RPi boxes, replicating parts, screws and bolts (given a 3rd party module), it's a powerful and handy tool. However, it might be horrible for someone with limited coding skills.
Although I fully agree with the second part of this comment as well - these days I only print a few things a year for custom projects and generally find that making items primarily out of wood and metal with a few plastic parts is a lot more satisfying and useful.
Try using a heated bed and enclosing the printer in a chamber to prevent draughts (anything will do, cardboard).
A heated bed and IPA work for me.
Making guns at home is as American as apple pie.
edit: apparently this didn't happen in the USA?
FDM printers: They use a spool of plastic as filament which is heated and layed down layer by layer in a small string, are the cheapest, safest, have a large print volume. On the downside they often break down (e.g. the filament gets jammed) and have a coarse resolution (the smallest details are around 0.1mm). Most popular ones are the Ender series from Creality and Prusa printes. Prices are from $150, filament is from $17/kg.
SLA printers: They use a liquid (called resin) the hardens (cures) under UV light, they print a whole layer at once. They are capable of printing super fine details, are less prone to breakdown (they just have 1 motor vs 4 or more in FDM). On the downside the resin they use is a very toxic material, you need to vent its air outside and always use protective gear. Also the print needs to be washed and cured after printing and they have a smaller build volume (iPad mini/iPad screen size) than FDM. You can get one from $250. Check out r/PrintedMinis on Reddit to see what they are capable of.
I suggest getting a FDM printer as the first one unless you really need the fine details, e.g. for printing miniature figures.
Woah. That's way better that I would've expected.
This seriously cannot be understated enough. When I was in my final year of high school (2012) my shop teacher was the first person in the entire school board to get a 3D printer, one of the cheapest machines on the market (I can't remember the brand, or the name, only the number at the bottom of the invoice - $11,374.38). He got the machine in February and tasked me to help him set it up. After months of dicking around with it, levelling the bed, using different slicers, trying all kinds of different models, nothing would print properly past the first ~5 layers. Dealing with tech support gave us files that printed absolutely beautifully, but no help getting our stuff to print.[0] After this experience I threw 3D printing to the back of my mind and didn't think about it again until last year...
When I bought an Ender 3 V2 around November. $250 at my door, an hour to put it together, another hour of tuning everything in, and I can count on one hand the number of non-user-error-related failed prints. With software packages like Octoprint and hardware mods like the BLTouch, I will argue that my 3D printer is significantly more reliable than any inkjet or laser print I've encountered.
[0]: That shop teacher retired the same year I graduated, so the printer got moved to the media/broadcasting room. As far as I've heard, that printer was put into permanent storage around 2015 because nobody else could get it working properly.
> But before this happened, I had an experience that prepared me, helped me see what to do, helped prepare me to see what to do when this happened, because at certain point, Xerox gave the Artificial Intelligence Lab, where I worked, a laser printer, and this was a really handsome gift, because it was the first time anybody outside Xerox had a laser printer. It was very fast, printed a page a second, very fine in many respects, but it was unreliable, because it was really a high-speed office copier that had been modified into a printer. And, you know, copiers jam, but there's somebody there to fix them. The printer jammed and nobody saw. So it stayed jammed for a long time.
> Well, we had an idea for how to deal with this problem. Change it so that whenever the printer gets a jam, the machine that runs the printer can tell our timesharing machine, and tell the users who are waiting for printouts, or something like that, you know, tell them, go fix the printer. Because if they only knew it was jammed, of course, if you're waiting for a printout and you know that the printer is jammed, you don't want to sit and wait forever, you're going to go fix it.
> But at that point, we were completely stymied, because the software that ran that printer was not free software. It had come with the printer, and it was just a binary. We couldn't have the source code; Xerox wouldn't let us have the source code. So, despite our skill as programmers -- after all, we had written our own timesharing system -- we were completely helpless to add this feature to the printer software.
Interesting to think how cheap and almost disposable printers became and how that might apply to 3D printers.
I too bought an Ender 3 V2, it was about £280 I got it the second it launched in the UK.
Print quality is greatz and once you learn its limitations you can upgrade.
First upgrade is to replace the bed springs with stronger "yellow springs", look them up on Amazon. They're stronger than the stock ones and you'll need to level the bed less often.
Learn to level manually, give it a year even then buy a BL Touch, you'll still need to level manually occasionally.
At this point I have upgraded mine to the point it's barely an Ender 3v2. Replaced the extruder/hotend with an E3D Hemera (direct drive) which prints flexibles like a champ, got a Pi official touch screen for OctoDash and a Pi 4B 4GB running OctoPrint (Pi 4B is overkill but I have a bunch of them at home).
If you do go for a direct drive the X becomes slow and heavy so next upgrade is a Dual Y-Axis, I went for the dual motor option but it splits the power from the board so torque is appalling, go for the belt type instead.
At this point you'll want to be custom building Marlin firmware because the Creality version which comes as stock is lacking. If you don't want to do it yourself there a bunch of community versions you can use if you can deal with their defaults (if you switch to a Hemera or other hotend/direct drive though, you're pretty much going to be custom building forever. There are nice easy to use build tools for VSCode/VSCodium called "AutoBuild Marlin" which sorts out the hard work, you just follow the instructions to tweaks some numhers and hit build. Firmware if installed by sticking it on the microSD and power cycling the printer with it inserted.
I also removed the bottom cover over the driver board and printed one with a 92mm fan slot and put an always-on Noctua with a buck converter, quieter and cooler.
Final mod I want to make is to cut holes in the metal shroud covering the PSU. The Creality design covers all of the vent holes on it leaving only the tiny, loud fan hole cooling the PSU.
Other upgrades include a magnetic bed for easy print removal, a webcam for remote viewing and time lapse / octo lapse (these are beautiful time lapse you see where the print hotend is out of the way) and perhaps a shroud/cupboard if you want to print ABS etc (not recommended with stock hotend or inside your home).
Wrote all of this on mobile so apologies for lack of citations/links, this should all be very searchable, happy to answer questions.
This is 100% my recommendation for a first time 3D printer. I bought a wanhou i3 about 4 years ago and it was endless frustration. The Ender 2 V2 has been a completely different experience. I have probably 200 hrs of prints through it and just a handful of relatively minor issues.
I did have trouble with Octoprint however. I stopped tinkering pretty quickly but IIRC there is some limitation to how the communication protocol works with the board and it caused me to miss steps here and there and generally resulted in poor prints. If that has been resolved would love to hear about it.
It’s a different style of firmware where all the gcode interpretation and motion calculations are done on the more powerful raspberry pi* and only the motion control pulse generation is done on the printer’s board.
You get very precise step control as a result and with no start-stop blobbing within a layer.
If you don’t want to go that far, look into max resolution settings in your slicer** to reduce tiny moves which might be overrunning the printer’s ability to process. Note that this is still useful with Klipper as well.
* I’m using zero-w Pi, which is still way more powerful than a printer board.
Last year I got an Ender 3 on Amazon for a fraction of the price (~$150) we spent on the Makerbot. I assembled it, plugged it in, set it to print the test file of the cat, and it just worked. The print was perfect, printed faster than the old Makerbot did, and had better resolution.
I normally don't like talking crap about things people put effort into, and I'm sure that those early-gen Makerbots were capable of doing good prints given enough tweaking, but boy were they really bad in terms of casual printing. It's not even obvious why that was the case considering that all these Chinese 3D printers aren't that different technologically. My only guess is that those laser-cut frames they had were too flimsy for even the most reasonable print speeds, resulting in jostling that would cause catastrophic failure with anything with more than a few inches of vertical height.
The weirdest thing I remember about the Makerbot was that, at the time, it came with nothing to hold the spool. What the actual F? My dad and I built one out of PVC and a roller bearing, if I remember correctly. The decision-making put into those printers was rather odd.
From the Cupcake to now:
1) A constant-speed DC Motor as an extruder is not sufficient for 3D printing, you really need to be able to change how much filament you're moving.
2) A small melt-zone in your hot-end is critical to reducing jamming - This is why the E3D design has been so reliable. Looking through some old pictures, I remember how insane the cupcake hotend was (wrap some Nichrome wire around coupler, and some thermal cement around that, and your thermistor attached to that, and wrap the whole thing with some fiberglass insulation and Kapton tape)
3) Proper mechanical components shouldn't really be substituted - M8 threaded rods are not ACME leadscrews.
I remain amazed at what the community (mostly Prusa, honestly) has been able to get out of 8-bit electronics.
I’ve found that the most useful stuff to print is not random items I find online, but things I model on my own. Most recently this was a series of mounts for the electronics for my Halloween display. 3/4 were my work, the last was a repurposed raspi mount. My favorite thing about the work was that I was solving a problem unique to me. It was a one-off, just-in-time solution.
Most of my designs aren’t glamorous, mostly functional items like mounts, standoffs, etc. I did print a ergo keyboard I designed (a la dactyl) but it turns out I suck at ergo design.
Probably haven’t gotten my money’s worth for the printer, but realizing relatively simple designs can be gratifying. Designing for print-ability with minimal supports is a fun challenge.
If there is something out there you need, I'd recommend searching Thingiverse, Prusa, and Thangs.com as they all have large libraries of free 3D printable objects.
Disclaimer: I'm the CTO at Thangs.com and also a bit of a 3D printing nerd ;-)
For example, upload an engine piston and it will find other pistons, then all the engines that the piston will also fit within. Handy for designers and mechanical engineers.
But, in the 3D printer use case it is most often used to find similar objects (it does both). For example, upload and a Squid Games mask to print for Halloween and find other Squid Games masks. It’s entirely geometric in that use case, and math doesn’t care if you have different languages or people add the right tags and categories.
Hopefully that makes more sense.
In general, that feature is used less than 1% of the time vs text search. We have a powerful text search engine which we’ve built and customized on top of a lucene implementation. We are generally improving CTR by a percent or two every week.
I've used Thangs before but hadn't really understood the use case for the reverse search. Thanks for the explanation!
Thanks from the bottom of my heart.
I’ve printed many usable and useful things around the house and with the kids. It’s been incredibly fun and even educational, but I generally don’t do it for things that you can pretty easily buy.
If your interested in digging in more within some generally positive and positive communities, I'd recommend r/3dprinting and r/functionalprint.
If yours is reliable, can you tell me what brand it is?
Some people have claimed to have run thousands of hours on their Prusa machines, as they are built for reliability above all.
Like all 3d printers they're still fiddly, finicky things in general. There's been a few times where I've needed to spend an hour fettling. But I've owned 3 printers before this and I would say the reliability improvement is at least an order of magnitude in terms of mtbf (where f = fiddling).
I have 3 minis now, 1 with 0.25 nozzle loaded with flex, 1 0.25 nozzle (petg/pla) for decorative/hires and 1 0.4 nozzle (petg/pla) for fast, functional prints. This has mostly eliminated the setup time and calibration required for different "job types".
I couldn't have done this before because just keeping 1 "less reliable" printer working exceeded the free time I was willing to spend on printer maintenance.
Still new - I got the bed leveled once, now I just slice, insert SD card, and print. I've printed 20+ items across as many days without needing to re-level the bed.
No problems with print quality, it just works.
Setup was ok for an absolute beginner, after watching a few YouTube tutorials.
My monoprice clone of the flash forge creator pro runs for many months like a laser printer. I can send a print job to it from upstairs and pick up the print when it’s done. That holy grail came from using a glass print bed, ABS slurry, enclosure, and a dial indicator to really nail the bed tramming.
I’ve since added auto-bed-leveling probes on the bed slingers and they reduce the fiddling significantly. I may add it on the monoprice just for consistency/convenience but it doesn’t seem to need it as much.
Anyway, the 3D printer is coming any day now.
The key thing for me in making lego that snapped was accounting for shrinkage in my prints; i just guessed and gollied a factor on a few parts, but those worked where others hadn't.
Now that I've got my settings for Legos dialed in I add Lego nubs to all sorts of things so you can attach regular Legos to them.
For example, I've printed a great many magnetic pins for my son's robotics team to give away as swag at competitions. They all had Lego nubs around the perimeter so the kids could attach Minifigures and other Lego parts to the pins.
We recently took out my old Crossbows and Catapults set, so my kids can play with it. Unfortunately, only one of the crossbows is still functional, as the plunger on all the others broke. I'd love to be able to 3D print new plungers so that we can use them again. When I checked on ebay, these games were going for hundreds of dollars (though spare parts can probably be scrounged up for much less).
3D printer + minor woodworking + paint/sealant knowledge just kills when it comes to diy. Though I would recommend usinh a 3D printing service, maintaining a prnter can be pot luck with respect to time consumption, and services offer way more choice.
I've had a 'D.I.WirePro' from Pensa Labs on my wishlist for a wee while now... https://www.pensalabs.com/
The ethos I was tuning into with my parent comment was more stuff like this: https://www.amazon.com/Home-Made-Contemporary-Russian-Folk-A...
Irrespective of who you mean, you should perhaps keep your sanctimony closer to your chest, it grates here.
> If you mean me, I run a shop with various machines that produce things as a business.
> Irrespective of who you mean, you should perhaps keep your sanctimony closer to your chest, it grates here.
I meant anyone. There's no need to attack. The ancestor comment wanted to 3d print a bottle drying stick, someone replied and said just make it out of wire, and I endorsed that idea, and clarified by saying that a machine is a waste when your needs are simple. Identifying use cases where specialized machines are not appropriate is worthy of discussion. I really meant bending wire hangers and pointed out that it would be bad to get a machine when literally bending wire hangers would work.
1. 3d printers are not very good for high dimensional accuracy. 2. A set of reamers is very helpful for dimensioning holes. Works much better than standard drill bits. 3. I find the smell and fragility of SLA material so problematic I never use my SLA printer. 4. Larger nozzle size/layer height has a HUGE impact on print time at the cost of resolution. 5. Since I also do CNC and need CAM investing in learning fusion360 was well worth it. I can design and print pretty quickly now. 6. If you don't like to tinker get a printer that has auto bed leveling. 7. Klipper is very worth investing in 8. Since your board mosfet can fail closed you need to be around and monitor your printer. Most systems have thermal runaway protection but if a mosfet fails closed fire is possible.
I have never printed a Benchy or whatever that cartoonish boat is called. I've printed a dimensional cube about three times, twice to prove to the various makerspaces I am a member of that I know how to do 3D printing before I can use their machines and once just to verify that my printer was accurate.
I rarely download and print STLs as they are. I usually tweak the model or completely rebuild it before printing.
Some things I have printed in my life: A food-grade plastic insert that sits inside of the Rubbermaid cereal storage containers that captures all the small broken bits of cereal and the cereal dust and prevents it ending up in your cereal bowl.
A drive cage for my workstation because it wouldn't fit due to PSU size. Learned how to create snap fit tabs. Also improved on the original cage design to handle 2.5" SSDs with extra cooling fans.
A snap fit cupola with fans to permit extra tall Noctua CPU coolers to fit in a 4U rackmount case.
Drawer insert trays to go in a library card catalogue drawer to prevent things from falling through.
Cubby hole insert trays to go in an antique postal center (one of those classic parisian style ones with lots of little doors).
Custom sized drawer organizers for the two "junk drawers" that every house seems to accumulate.
Wall attached battery holders so that the rechargeable AA and AAA batteries that are in the queue to be charged are kept organized.
A custom box to hold all the Munchkin cards and cards for other card games.
A custom box to hold all the Munchkin Quest parts and cards. Plus some little figurines to represent the Munchkin Quest monsters.
And a half-dozen other "useful" items around the home.
I've gotta say, the convenience of having the printer is great, but the amortized cost of each print is about $700 at this time.
There is a whole history of materials science and production techniques to get to the 'stuff' we have today, 3D printing is rather 1 dimensional in comparison.
And don't talk to me about Blender and the like. I'm thinking about getting a Wacom Intuos pro.
I'm done, I can't get the monkey off my back. I see it coming, hundreds of printed miniatures stacked in boxes, unpainted. Some of them probably designed by myself in the foreseeable future.
So maybe I should make the best of it and sell them as a side/hobby business...
Spark plugs are interesting examples of ubiquitous and essential objects with a particular combination of mechanical and electrical requirements.
Like you said, spark plugs require high-heat and high electrical insulation properties. Hence why spark plugs are made out of ceramics (or glass) and metal.
Spark plugs also have a heat rating, which indicates how well the plug is able to extract heat from the tip. If the heat extracting properties of the plug aren't just right, a modern turbocharged engine will not run properly.
Lastly, with the power output of modern coil-on-plug designs, the electric arcs will eat away the electrode quite quickly. That is why spark plugs have a coating on the electrodes to increase longevity.
3D-printing of ceramics is possible, though I do not know how the properties of ceramic polymer filaments hold up. The metal parts will require high resolution (the threads, the spark gap).
So yeah, it might be possible to 3D-print a spark plug, but it will require expensive machines (metal printing, ceramics printing) and the resulting plug will be orders of magnitude more expensive as a traditionally created spark plug. It will also not last as long.
My own messing around with a 3d printer has generally confirmed it's an amazing tool for making jigs of all kinds, but the actual prints aren't usually that useful in and of themselves.
While it is possible to 3D print silicone, and while that would still be cheaper than anything I see on the first page of Amazon search results even today, it was clearly much more sensible to 3D print a reusable mould to pour silicone into.
Then you can expand the idea into a cottage industry by having multiple moulds, with fluid channels, as a single unit.
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggested a 3D printed multi-mould the size of a shipping container would supply all global demand for mensural cups, but then I found Alibaba and it listed mensural cups for less per hundred than the local store listed them per unit[0], and I figured the purchase price already had nothing to do with manufacturing costs and wasn’t something I could optimise.
[0] at the time, they’re only 20-30 times cheaper today
Can you think of other common (even if usually unseen) objects that are especially bad matches for what 3D printing can practically create? Optical lenses and ball bearings also come to mind, but somehow they are less interesting than spark plugs.
Until I got a CPAP machine.
The masks are made to fail, from cheap elastics that stretch out after 3 months, to flimsy plastic that is supposed to be under strain and guaranteed to fail. And at $200-$600 to replace the 'shitty bits' a 3d printer will pay for itself very quickly.
Edit: Lots of advice further down in the comments! Thanks everybody!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-50840434
I'm also curious about SLA 3D printing for casting models, there seems to be types of resin specifically designed for 'burning out' too.
The tools can be more accessible than a 3D printer, can take up less room, and you get a skill that you get satisfaction from.
I’ve repaired so many things with it, and engaged in so many new hobbies.
Having a device in your house that can, within reason, magic any item you can dream of into existence is game changing.
- buildings on various planets/moons
- replacement organs
- teeth and bone structures
- electronics and various nanotech systems
- food
- clothing
- automatic self-assembly components
Happy printing!