• Tenthrow@lemmy.worldMEnglish
    63·
    19 days ago

    That struggle is so real… Although, once you start to learn paremetric modeling, you stop having as much plastic waste around and a whole bunch of slightly different prototypes of a desk organizer or toilet roll holder that result from not measuring properly the first time.

    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
      11·
      19 days ago

      I measure 3 times and still need to print at least 3 times to get something right.

      I’m working on an outdoor hose grommet that’s a custom fit to my house. I measured with calipers. I also took paper, traced the fixture and marked the holes before modeling and 3d printing.

      I have a desk full of badly fitting prototypes. -or just bad because I forgot to set a print setting in the slicer.

      • toynbee@lemmy.world
        11·
        19 days ago

        I need to print something to repair my garage door rail. I have no idea how to get started on measuring that.

        That’s okay, though. I also need to fix my 3d printer before I can get started on the other project.

              • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
                8·
                19 days ago

                I found my dad’s old calipers and the inside of the case had disintegrated. I wanted to print a new inside mold for the caliper case. But that meant taking measurements of the calipers. So I bought new calipers to measure the old calipers.

    • hakunawazo@lemmy.world
      4·
      18 days ago

      Wow, you put real effort in that. Do you need to separate paths for that or can you 3D print any random image?

      • batmaniam@lemmy.world
        5·
        18 days ago

        It was actually very low effort! There are a number of image to STL converters. I used this one: https://imagetostl.com/

        Like you can see it’ll flub some stuff. I would have been better off filling in the areas of text and doing the emboss manually myself, but I just wanted to hit print. 2% infill, I think it was like 2.5g of filament and 20mins.

        It’s fun to screw around with that process. I’m tweaking one of my friends cabin to use to make a mold. My goal is cast concrete or something similar so I can pound some thin copper around it, and be left with a cool wall decoration.

  • PieMePlenty@lemmy.world
    25·
    18 days ago

    I’ve pretty much settled on just printing flower pots and cute animals for my sister. Last one was this bulbapot

  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    19 days ago

    Me 5 years after buying a 3D printer: been working on CAD’ing that one project for well over a year with probably about as much time left before it’s ready for its first prototype.

    (And that doesn’t include all the time I was distracted with other projects, many of which were not 3D-printing related at all.)

    I’ll dust my printer off when it’s time for that first prototype.

  • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    91·
    19 days ago

    Almost all my prints these days are ones I’ve created or modified in freecad.

      • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        18 days ago

        It just has a steep learning curve. Since the 1.0 release though I’ve had few problems with it. Nice addons and only freezes up for long periods when you are importing a massive mesh so far. I’ve gotten pretty good at taking one color stl files and converting them to multi color/extruder.

  • 5in1K@lemmy.zipEnglish
    41·
    19 days ago

    I generally do functional prints or iterative prototyping. Friends and family like the tchotchkes though so I do print them from time to time.

  • Frenchgeek@lemmy.ml
    3·
    17 days ago

    I should learn how to use FreeCAD (or OpenSCAD) but unfortunately, my printer cannot print motivation…

  • Scott@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    19 days ago

    Recently just started my 3d printer back up. Had 2 full spools still in the box, opened it and just started breaking. The filament just explodes when it gets old.

    Had to buy a brand new spool of filament for a $0.20 part.

    And it has no automatic bed leveling, so it took like 6 attempts to get it flat enough.

    • Pup Biru@aussie.zoneEnglish
      6·
      18 days ago

      have you tried drying it? filament gets wet when exposed to humid air for a while, and one of the noticeable effects is brittleness

      if you’re going to store any filament, an air-tight container (cheapest is a vacuum bag) with some desiccant

      • Scott@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        18 days ago

        Was in a sealed bag with silica gel. Both spools did get heat cycles to over 100f a few times when the AC shit the bed… Multiple times.