Holy smokes, I had no idea there were so many. Usually I just search Thingiverse. I think it’s safe to say I’m pretty active there. But 3D Printing Era lists 16 sources for printable 3D models and I’d be remiss not exploring some of these. Some are paid sites, which is cool, I guess. Many are not exactly focused on FFF printers. …
Replacing the Ceramic Tape on the Heater Block
It’s time to fix the ceramic tape. No patch job this time. There is embarrassingly little written up on how to do this properly. The best I could find was a PDF on how to assemble the Mk7. In the end I managed but I made a lot of mistakes along the way. And sometimes the point of a tutorial is so …
New Acetone Fogger
So I built a new acetone fogger. There it is. Works great. Wide mouth canning jar with regular jar ring attached to a coat hanger in the same way as last time, only on one side this time since I don’t need all 3. I’ve found that increasing the time does make the prints better, but it can make removing …
Panic attack turns I-D-Ten-T Error
Sometimes finding what’s wrong with the makerbot is just a matter of knowing where to look. In this case the problem was between the keyboard and the chair. This is not a good thing to see. Especially when it’s just a little print. It was filling up the whole print bed, tearing the Kapton tape off, and clicking at the …
Joseph Chiu’s Toybuilder Labs is Open!
Friend of the blog Joseph Chiu has scaled up his filament sale operation with it’s own website: Toybuilderlabs.com. I can already vouch for the exceptional quality of both his PLA, which was an incredibly painless first time experience with the stuff, and ABS. In fact my next round of Chessbots will all be Toybuilder Labs ABS. His prices are only slightly higher than …
Chessbot on 3DHacker
Fellow 3D Printing enthusiast and vlogger Andrew Mazzotta, tired from sourcing upgrades on 8 different websites and thought “wouldn’t it be easier if there was just one place for all these things.” So he created 3DHacker.com and invited anyone to showcase their projects and builds and offer them to interested parties. You can host whatever project you want on 3D Hacker and …
So far so good
I hope I’m not jinxing it but my latest round of repairs seems to be doing their job well, well aside from the bad skin issue on large object which I haven’t delved into. I’ve been restocking my dual–extruded objects. Maybe next week I’ll be on Chess sets, but I want to eventually upgrade to the newest version of Sailfish, …
Thingiverse Custom Lithophanes
Exciting to see this morning that Thingiverse’s web version of OpenSCAD aka “Customizer” can now accept uploaded files making possible a custom lithphane script. Apparently my work has merited credit in this, which is cool. Naturally Thingiverse is flooded with people making lithophanes they have no intention of printing. Every meme and logo is going to be lithophaned by the …
3D Printed Stepper Motor… kind of.
For those who don’t know, a stepper motor is the basic muscle of a 3D printer. Instead of other motors which are basically “on = go, off = stop” a stepper motor is told how far to move and it does, which makes it perfect for, say, telling the arm of a 3D printer to go to a specific location …
Wow, really bad skin
Printed Kid Entropie’s Dice Tower for my brother-in-law. It’s functional but… what is all over that surface? Ben Withers was just complaining about this and seems to think it’s related to alt-shell and I’d love to test it, but I don’t think I’m printing another one of those. They’re huge. Took all day. Part of me just wants to take …