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Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • There’s not much real world time savings to be had with the all-in-one machines except for the potential (or perhaps inevitable) gap between remembering to shovel your laundry from the washer to the dryer. If your life works like mine where you’re doing something else and not paying attention to the laundry machines – riding motorcycles, wrenching on engines, taking obsessively detailed pictures of pocketknives – that slack time can indeed be significant.

    The major thing is that the heat pump dryers, including the ones in the all-in-ones, are significantly more energy efficient than a traditional resistive element dryer. Like, up to 70%. (Mind you, “up to” includes a fairly wide range depending on which two models you’re comparing.) You can do your own math but figure that a traditional full sized electric dryer probably uses about 5 kWh per cycle. If you live in one of those trendy areas of the country where electricity is north of 40 cents per kWh, chopping whatever it is you use in half might be appealing.





  • Watertight and waterproof are not quite the same thing.

    Almost all 3D printable materials are waterproof, in that they will not dissolve in water. (With the exception of, e.g., PVA which is sometimes used as a dissolvable support material.) I realize this is not the intent of your question, but a lot of people seem to get it twisted about various polymers absorbing moisture/being hygroscopic/becoming “wet” and therefore believe that they literally melt or soften in water over time or something. This is not the case.

    3D prints can be made watertight but it does not necessarily follow that all of them are by default. This will be dependent on your print settings and, to a certain extent, your print material. Some materials are more isotropic than others and the layer lines stick together more readily without gaps. TPU leaps to mind, which can be made extremely watertight very easily.

    Use a lot of walls – another poster recommended 4, that’s probably a good place to start. Don’t forget to increase your top and bottom layer counts as well. You may need more top or bottom layers than walls, because your layers are probably thinner in the Z axis than your nozzle extrudes in X and Y. If dimensional clearance is not an issue and in your case it seems it isn’t, consider increasing your extrusion multiplier slightly in the walls as well, to ensure that material is squished into any potential gaps. Avoid sharp corners or tiny points on your model, which upon slicing may be incompletely filled. Avoid long unsupported bridges as well, because the couple of layers where these inevitably sag will wind up non-solid. If possible, make the outer shell of your model an exact multiple of your wall extrusion thickness so your slicer will not have to guess at any areas and try to fill them with tiny points or similar. If you play back your slicer’s preview of a single layer you’ll see what I mean.

    If you really want to employ the nuclear option, instruct your slicer to iron every single layer. This will make your print take forever, but each individual later will be extremely authoritatively bonded together in the X and Y axes, with no gaps.

    If failure is not an option, coat your object after completion with Flex Seal or Plasti-Dip or something.



  • I took a look at OP’s machine and it appears to be one of those deals with one big central hinge cover with upper and lower clamshell halves. So, we’re both sunk. It’s symmetrical in this case, but there is nothing to mirror. They will need to have an existing one (or all the bits and pieces of their busted one, maybe) to measure up and clone.

    But yes, I have also seen laptops where the left and right hinges and/or their covers are different from each other.




  • You used the magic word, “modern.”

    Lots of houses in this world are not modern, and some of them are old enough that they were retrofitted to have electricity, as mine was, rather than even being built with it to begin with. And done so in a haphazard manner when electrical codes were either much more lax than now or didn’t exist. And further when the expected power draw for a household was considerably lower, because basically all of it in the 1920’s or whatever was only used for lighting and we didn’t have all of our current appliances, TV’s, computers, 3D printers, or even indoor space heaters.

    So moaning about what ought to be rather than what is really doesn’t accomplish anything, especially in OP’s case.

    My small house has basically the entire ground floor wired to only two 15 amp circuits.




  • I would not buy a Razer if they paid me $120. Do yourself a favor and don’t. I’ve owned a fair few Razer products in my life and they’ve all been overpriced flimsy pieces of shit, and when they break Razer will do anything and everything to weasel out of doing anything about it. As a matter of fact, the last Razer product I had break on me was a Blackwidow Chroma, and not coincidentally it was the last Razer product I will ever buy. I think it made it a whole nine months.

    Anyway, I was in this very boat not too long ago and settled on the Glorious GMMK 3 100% for my wife, which is indeed available in white. It’s $140 USD list price, so I don’t know how that fits your budget. She got some nice cat themed keycaps for it and she’s having a ball. You can get it with various keyswitch options prepopulated, or even swap the switches around as you see fit. She got the “Fox” linear keyswitches which are not short throw but are definitely quiet.

    I use a Logitech G512 Carbon at the moment, myself. It’s not white but it has otherwise been bomber for over a year.

    This is a sterling endorsement for me. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed but I type a lot. Not just bickering in the comments, but for work as well. I am not rough on keyboards and mine never moves from this spot, but I will tickle the keyswitches on any 'board a couple of million times in short order and I probably find the service limit on all the keys that are not W, A, S, or D more quickly than the average penguin.



  • For what it’s worth, the I-95 corridor from about Richmond to Boston, particularly the DC-Balitmore-Philly-NYC part, is probably one of the worst stretches of highway in the country for generalized insanity and phenomenally poor driving skills on display from everyone involved. It is easily my most hated patch of asphalt in the universe.

    A small but measurable improvement would be made to the world instantly if every person in DC and Baltimore had their licenses revoked. Although if experience is any judge, that still wouldn’t prevent any of them from still all being on 95, three inches from the car in front and raging over “only” being able to do 80 in a 55.