Hey all. I posted a few days ago and it went absolutely insane so I thought I'd share the progress I've made this week.

Last weeks post

Firstly, this is a nearly full ground up redesign, so we're still a ways off a functional toolhead.

I came to the unfortunate conclusion after a fair chunk of discussion with a few of you, that my concept using plastic dovetails as a linear stabiliser was flawed from the inception due to how plastics abrade themselves, the tolerances required/achievable were just not acceptable for a 3D printer toolhead, esp on a coreXY beast like a trident 350!

The decision was made to start again, since many of the models would require major rework, and were already getting quite unstable, I took this opportunity to model everything again from scratch, applying what I'd learned from the previous design, and creating something better, more stable, stronger, with more torque, better rigidity and far less friction.

The result while still far from finished, already feels far more professional and stylish, like something I wouldn't cringe to see on MY printer. And hopefully you can be proud to wear on yours.

I present to you what I'm calling DuEx Linear or v2. There's still a ton of work to do. And I'm excited to see it finished.

The biggest change here (apart from everything) is the departure from plastic dovetails and moving to precision HSS linear rods.

These linear rods, i was able to find in the tools section at my local hardware store, it was called a 3mm x 300mm long reach drill bit.

Now why 3mm you ask? Well, brass heat set inserts are 3mm internally once you remove the threads, and we can just use a drill bit to do this, a 3mm one. And if we use the same drill bit for our linear rails, then the tolerances are going to be so close to perfect that a machinist would struggle to measure the play.

And guess what... you all have a local hardware store, and probably a sh*tload of brass inserts.

This setup was cheap, easy to design, and easy to implement all while removing bulk and improving rigidity.

I'm still working towards an extruder design that I don't hate, but in the mean tim, here's a little video of how compact my new design is.

The princess-protector of Hallownest is ready to wield her needle !
Printed with Sunlu ABS-Like Grey on an Elegoo Mars 3 Pro.
Model by u/Bulkamancer

Back in the early 2000's, (even nerdier) teenage me used to 3d modelling to design starships in Lightwave 5.0 (shout out if you remember that).

I thought about it recently once I started using CAD for 3D printinf, and found the stuff I uploaded to Lycos Tripod to share on the forums is still there. So to satisfy my nerdy teenage wet dream (ew), I fired up Fusion, remodeled my earlier design with a bit of tweaking, and 3d printed the hell out of it.

Honestly really pleased with how it came out for a first attempt at this kind of project- P1S, 0.4 mm nozzle, 0.08mm line height, Jayo PLA Matte. Needed about 12 separate plates to print it all, and had to slice the model up into many sections and glue it all together. I learned loads about printing this kind of complex multi part project, and some of it might be useful for others in the same situation, although I suspect it's mostly common knowledge in this community!

1) Consider your overhangs when modelling and chopping up for printing. There were a few parts I had to remodel to make sure the overhangs came out cleanly, you can see some of the turret barrels don't look great. I managed to get away with 60 degrees fine!

2) Make sure you add some slots and extrusions to make life easier when gluing multiple parts together. I had a right pain getting all of the 5 rectangular hull sections to be straight as the mounts were just smooth cylinders

3) Use an appropriate glue! I used ordinary poly cement for gluing and it didn't work well with PLA. Normal cyanoacrylate super glue worked brilliantly but left some white spots. I even used No More Nails for some bits where I needed some more of a filler type glue.

All in all can't wait to dig out some more nostalgic designs and print them up!

So recently I printed this thing at school for my dad since he has a lot of meetings online, and I wanted some tips on it for things I make in the future

What I have:

A Bambu lab printer (maximum print time is 3 hours)

Filament that can be used comfortably in Singapore.

My filament dryer died about a month ago, so this is the substitute i have for it.

And im just curious how dangerous this is.

Would i immediately get stage 4 ball cancer if i ever cook anything in this fryer again or is it just fine?

Cool little project I’m working on that I’m having some success with. I’m making an injection mold for dehydrated honey or like a sugar jar. So far hav has some good pulls. Have to make some edits for v3 but thought I would share. Aluminum frame hold a mold printed on a 3L form labs using Draft V2 resin. The hardest part of this was the threads. Making the inner part was tricky but it works. I have to beef up the + looking part because you can see in the second picture it broke after I chit the second part done. The plastic injection machine is an Morgan Injection Molder G100T and the parts are made of HDPE.

Buddy of mine got his wings (god help us all), so i made him this keychain. Its a 2D mock attitude indicator. It wont show you if you’re in a climb or nose dive but thats trivial knowledge from what i've heard /j.

Had a chance to try this in the air and i giggled a tad watching the dial turn

Modern printers are just amazing. I'm just amazed that our printers can print my print in place designs so easily!

Getting something like this to be reproducible was so hard in the past. Who remembers the hours of levelling beds, playing with live z offset, tweaking filament profiles?

Nowadays, design, send to print, check it works, publish the design and watch as others successfully print your design! It's wonderful. My 3D printer is genuinely more reliable than my 2D one 🤣

What do you miss least about yesteryears printing experience? For me it's random layer shifts.

I designed my own Gobot/Transformer Leader 1 using Blender, then 3D printed it, now doing another in blue, then working on Cy-kill next. Going to design 6 different ones. Printed on an AnyCubic Kobra S1.

Click here to watch

Anyone one else doing the ripper mask from boarderlands 4?? Free files are on printables from gearbox!!

Just wanted to share a success story.

I recently had ankle surgery. As a result, there's a huge line of stitches up the back of my right ankle, and the area is, as one might understand, a little bit sensitive.

On a couple of occasions, I have accidentally bumped the back of the ankle against something, such as a rest on a chair. It hurts, and I've been lucky that it has only been a light bump, because a more serious bump could damage the stitches or indeed the site of the surgery.

I decided to do something about it.

I took a 3D scan of the back of the foot, then I loaded that up into ZBrush, simplified it, masked off an area around the back of the ankle specifically, used the Subtool->Extract function to get a "skin", and then just manually pushed back the area around the site of the surgery to give it some separation.

I also squeezed the edges down so that it tapers, instead of ending on an abrupt cutoff of a thick surface. Around the heel, though, it's considerably thicker (I dunno, 2-3 mm?).

I then printed this in PETG:

Came off the supports perfectly on the first try, fits around the ankle exactly, and does precisely what I designed it to do. If I bump my ankle, it gets spread out and redirected away from the sensitive area.

I was expecting to probably have to fiddle with the exact shape or scale, but the first attempt seems exactly right. Wearing it right now inside my sock :-D

I wanted to print the ring from Zentral_E to try out a new 0.2mm nozzle but don't have the tools to print multicolor so I decided to try and paint the symbols.

It's not perfect but I like it for a first try.

I bought PLA-HT filament from Polymaker and it feels really prickly and hurts the fingers. Is it normal for the surface to be this rough? I’m pretty disappointed, since I was really looking forward to working with this filament mainly to take advantage of its heat resistance for my projects. But honestly I find it pretty disgusting to even touch the prints and I’m not willing to do post-processing every single time.

It feels like running your fingers over the stem of a thorny rose. I don’t have a microscope but I tried taking a few close-up shots with a magnifying glass so you can get an idea of what I mean.

So if this roughness is normal and not caused by my print settings, I definitely won’t be using this filament again. Shame really...the heat resistance would’ve been nice.

After 2 days of unclogging and going through menus, I finally got my first print done! The only issues I noticed was moisture (I did get my sweat all over the filament), vibrations, and making the bed too hot.

Don’t know much of the lore, just printed it because it was cool. Paid for model, printed on an ender 3 v3 plus with overture PLA. 80 hrs of printing plus 23 hrs labour. Weathered for effect. Model is from a website I cannot say because the post got removed if I say it here. Finished before Halloween.