There are only so many battles we can fight in life and I’m a selective battle fighter. I like to try different things. I suppose you could call me a, “dabbler.” Sometimes I decide I like the thing I’m trying and continue on with it, other times after getting into it to some degree I realize it’s harder than I anticipated and it’s just not something I want to keep on with. Opera singing. I didn’t take voice lessons to become an opera singer, but it would sure be something interesting to try. I would venture to guess it’s infernally hard to sing well in, well, however you sing for an opera. It would be fun, it would be hard, I would move on.
My children like to tease me about what my next fad/craze/obsession will be. I have no idea what I was going to say next. I got interrupted three hours ago and now that I’m back, I don’t even know what I was writing about. My husband knows to give me space for the ten minutes it usually takes me to write these posts, but sometimes, interruptions happen. Let me see if I can read what I wrote and try to finish this post in the original direction I intended it to go. This could be challenging given that my son is very excited behind me, laughing and exclaiming loudly all sorts of things because he got his father to play Minecraft with him and he’s busy showing off how powerful his character is and how much he knows. I shall endeavor to focus and ignore the gleeful laughter coming from two desks over.
I think I was going to say that sometimes, the thing you pick up and try turns out to be something that’s a good fit. Being lazy is a really good fit for me I feel like some days. Recently, I thought I’d try out make up. I bought a variety of things, watched a lot of videos and in theory, I know what to do. But it wasn’t fun. I thought I’d look much different, hopefully a more radiant, younger version of me. But instead it was a lot of stuff on my face that felt uncomfortable and I didn’t think I looked better at all. Also, it was messy.
3D printing seems to suit me though. I don’t get discouraged when things fail. Which is odd, because if you ask my husband, he’ll tell you pretty much everything annoys me. I think he might be exaggerating with, “everything” but he’s not far off. I have gotten frustrated and turned off the printer to go to bed and fight the challenging model/filament/settings the next day, but more often than not I’m up too late because I’m still working away on something.
I’ve been watching a lot of professional 3D printing people (professional in the sense that they’re sustained by Patreon supporters and other revenue from their YouTube channel) and I know that they fail in their prints all the time. I keep talking about this failing as opposed to all the successes I’ve had. For some reason the failures are more interesting than the successes because if I was successful all the time I wouldn’t know nearly as much about 3D printing and quite possibly I’d be a lot less interested.
Today I was having one of those failing days. I’d found what I thought would be a very nice model to print for one of my son’s teachers as a holiday gift. It was complex with multiple parts, four of which were very thin and delicate. I decided to print those pieces first because if I couldn’t get prints I was satisfied with, I wasn’t going to print the larger, much longer print of the main body. The model is a pen holder with a grill pattern for the side walls that’s delicate.
I tried printing it several times but the filament wasn’t holding well to the build plate because there were a lot of single lines of extruded plastic that had nothing else to anchor to. I changed the temperature of the build plate and the filament, thinking I wasn’t getting it hot enough or I had it too hot, either of which could cause problems. I changed filaments and started over and still had problems. I decided to add something called a ‘brim’ to the print. Imagine a ladies hat with a large brim around the perimeter. That brim would lay down around the outside of the model and would hopefully hold it in place. Which it did, but it only held in place the edges and not the little fiddly bits in the middle.
I had only one thing left to try and I didn’t like doing it. I put the model on a raft. Imagine the kind of raft like you read about in children’s stories where they lash together some logs that make a flat surface for you to float on top of. A raft in 3D printing is just that. You print a sacrificial few layers of filament making a strong plate under the model. The fractionally sticks to the raft, making it almost a guaranteed successful print in that sense, but it’s at the cost of both time (it takes a good while to make the solid raft) and filament, which is wasteful.
It worked though but more than doubled the print time. I had three more of the side panels to print and I was about to start the next raft when something occurred to me as I was prepping my daughters backpack for the first day of school tomorrow—she needed a gluestick in her pencil pouch.
Gluestick! Gluesticks are included in many filament orders I’ve received because it’s one of the best tools to help the first layer of filament stick to the build plate. I used it a lot initially until I realized the type coating on the plate on our the printer we got really didn’t need it for most models.
I had spent the better part of the day trying different things and if I’d just remembered the gluestick it would have saved me so much time. The good news is that since I the glue on the build plate, I’ve kicked off three prints, walked away and come back an hour later to perfect prints.
The Big Boy Tiny Girl Candy Sorting Spot: My children are spend time with a select few of their friends outside. They can also do some things in the garage as there is airflow with the open door. It was cramped in there with bicycles and the things my son and Rayan had created, so today Keira, my daughter and I cleared out the cars, blew away the leaves, art and debris with the leaf blower, trashed the junk, recycled the recyclables, decided what should go in the attic, moved things to other areas of the garage to make more room and then put the bicycles and other things in spots according to use. We had so much more room. I went inside to start this post (which then got interrupted) and came back tonight to find this:
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