3D Printing Advice

[yoderjac]

I doubt I'll get much feedback on a hunting forum as it is only tangentially related to hunting. Many of the small parts we use, like the throw levers on my scopes are 3D printed. But, you never know. Yes, I am looking at some of the 3D forums, but since I'm new to this, I wouldn't know who the shills were, who was BSing, and who was legit. At least on this forum, I have a feel for the folks who shoot straight.

So, I've been doing some research into 3D printers. I was looking at the higher end of the market for a while, but after digging deep, I decided that there are some emerging capabilities at that end of the market that I would like to see mature a bit before investing that kind of money.

I'm not looking to start a business or anything like that, but I would like the printer to be useful. My primary purpose is education. First for myself. I just like learning new stuff. I'm finding it harder and harder to sit out in the cold and hunt. I love it during archery and muzzleloader seasons, but when December rolls around and things get cold, I'm finding it more and more difficult. So, another objective is an indoor hobby during the winter months. I also have a pair of young neighbor boys that I think would be interested in learning about this technology.

I looked at the lower end of the market, but I think there are too many limitations for it to be useful beyond education. Today I ordered a mid-range printer, the Bambu P2S. This printer can handle engineering filaments and has a reasonable size print bed size.

I know enough to know that 3D printing is a multi-step process. You first need a model. You can download them, some free and some pay-for. You can design your own with CAD software, or you can buy a 3D scanner and scan and edit and actual object. I designed our new home (currently under construction) using FreeCad, which many folks use to design 3D printed parts. It is not institutive and has a bit of a steep learning curve. I've reasonably competent with some of the workbenches, but I have little experience with the Part Design workbench that most use for designing 3D printed parts. That 3D model then gets imported into the printer control/slicer software. In my case, it will be Bambu Studio. This is where you setup the printer and slice the model.

The printer I ordered won't be in until sometime in Jan, so in the mean time, I'm learning the Part Design workbench in FreeCad and Bambu Studio.

So, in the off chance that any of you are into 3D printing, please let me know. I don't have any specific questions at this point, but I'd love to here what you've done and how it worked out along with any issues and how you resolved them.

Maybe this isn't that much of a long-shot. I think I recall, years back, on another hunting forum, seeing someone post pictures of root pruning containers similar to Rootmaker 18s that he 3D printed. I think with the technology back then, it took him many, many, hours to print one.

 

[swat1018]

Some of the iPad Pros and iPhone pros have LIDAR incorporated. Before I retired we used an iPad pro to scan crashed vehicles on traffic homicide investigations. The data could then be used in many areas including 3D printing small scale exhibits of the vehicles. I scanned a lot of vehicles, but was never the one who was responsible for transforming the images into the 3D models.

 

[yoderjac]

Some of the iPad Pros and iPhone pros have LIDAR incorporated. Before I retired we used an iPad pro to scan crashed vehicles on traffic homicide investigations. The data could then be used in many areas including 3D printing small scale exhibits of the vehicles. I scanned a lot of vehicles, but was never the one who was responsible for transforming the images into the 3D models.

Very interesting. Some of the 3D printers use LIDAR as well. Sounds like a good example of a practical use.

 

[Jake_Willy]

I have the same printer. It is pretty much plug and play. I think I bumped rhe plate temp up a little to get it to stick with pla better but thats it. I don't know how to design anything but you can find a lot of stuff between printable and thingiverse.

 

[yoderjac]

I have the same printer. It is pretty much plug and play. I think I bumped rhe plate temp up a little to get it to stick with pla better but thats it. I don't know how to design anything but you can find a lot of stuff between printable and thingiverse.

I'm most interested in designing stuff that I can 3D print. I've been trying to learn the Part Design workbench in Freecad. I've made a couple of designs so far. I'm also interested in the material science part of the equation, trying to determine what filaments to use for which projects based on their characteristics. It looks like Bambu Studio is a pretty good tool for slicing the designs and controlling the print job.

When I ordered the PS2 the web site said it was out of stock and would be shipped in Jan. I got an email the other day that said it had been shipped. I checked the Fedex tracking number and it is supposed to arrive tomorrow! A pleasant surprise! It looks like I'll spend tomorrow doing setup.

It looks like I'll be limited to PLA and PETG for now. We are living in the finished space in the barn while the house is being built. I have no outdoor venting here. I need to make sure the house build has an outdoor vent that is capped off for now. Once I decide where I will put the printer permanently, I can run the indoor part of the venting.

 

[Jake_Willy]

Well that is a pleasant surprise. I wish I had the patience to learn CAD. My father in law wanted taller legs on his couch I suggested he 3d print some, he uses CAD at work, took him no time and he had them printing and looked identical to the original just an inch taller.

I haven't tried petg but pla is quick and cheap. Even if I want something stronger I usually do one first in pla as a test print before using ASA.

Even without designing I've printed pretty useful stuff. Backpack and bow hangars for my treestands, wall hangers for my hunting room, a lot of random stuff for reloading ammo, adjustable trail camera mounts. If you design things you'll for sure get some use out of the printer.

Good luck and enjoy

 

[yoderjac]

Well that is a pleasant surprise. I wish I had the patience to learn CAD. My father in law wanted taller legs on his couch I suggested he 3d print some, he uses CAD at work, took him no time and he had them printing and looked identical to the original just an inch taller.

I haven't tried petg but pla is quick and cheap. Even if I want something stronger I usually do one first in pla as a test print before using ASA.

Even without designing I've printed pretty useful stuff. Backpack and bow hangars for my treestands, wall hangers for my hunting room, a lot of random stuff for reloading ammo, adjustable trail camera mounts. If you design things you'll for sure get some use out of the printer.

Good luck and enjoy

Thanks for the encouragement! I will say the learning curve in Freecad for 3D printing purposes is pretty steep. I'm catching on to it, but slowly. Thanks for the tip of doing test prints in PLA. That makes sense. It will let me test out some designs now and move to engineering materials that need vented later.

You are right about finding useful stuff to print without designing it yourself. Bambu has a fan kit you can buy for venting. You then print the rest of the parts to attach the fan to the back of the P2S and connect piping to vent it out doors. The only thing they have to ship is the fan and electronics cause you just print the rest of it.

 

[yoderjac]

One of the things I'm learning is that I'm going to need a new computer. Any old computer will be fine for controlling the 3D printer, but I'm finding Freecad is becoming onerous on my current computer. Back in 2019 I bought an HP Envy Laptop. It was a pretty hot laptop for its day. It has an Intel Core i7-8565U CPU with a nominal speed of 1.8 GHz and a NVIDIA GeForce MX250 GPU.

I've upgraded to laptop over time to a fast solid state M.2 solid state drive and maxed out the memory. It was a Windows 10 computer that I reluctantly updated to Windows 11 when Windows 10 lost support.

I noticed when Freecad got slow my GPU was idle as was disk access. After some digging, I found Freecad is only using the GPU for the 3D graphics and most of the model math is executed on the CPU. It is a single threaded program, so it doesn't take advantage of multiple cores. Therefore, the raw CPU performance is the limiting factor.

Laptops, in general, are optimized for a balance between performance and energy consumption. My laptop. like most, has suffered some physical damage over time hauling it around everywhere. I needed that back when I was working and traveling a lot. Recently, I lost the functioning of some of the keys on teh keyboard. I have hundreds of application, and it is a real PITA to upgrade to a new computer. Finding licenses and reinstalling apps is painful. So, a few months ago, I decided to take a different approach.

I decided to convert my laptop to a quasi-desktop. I got a docking station and a couple of monitors and a remote keyboard (already had a remote mouse). The laptop no longer travels. It sits in one spot. I recently purchased a new low-end laptop for travel. I have some remote control software. Since I now have fiber internet at home, I can remote in from the travel laptop and have access to all my files and applications. So, my travel laptop need very few applications on it.

Well, this concept still holds, but it looks like eventually, I'll need to get a new desktop. I can get a desktop that is focused on high performance. Some of the new CPUs are 800% or more faster than the CPU in my laptop. I guess that is not surprising given the difference between laptops and desktops and 6 years of technology progress.

Right now, we are temporarily living in 500 sq ft of living space in our barn and the barn is packed full of our furniture while our retirement home is under construction. I will likely wait until we are in the new house to buy a desktop. Until then I will suffer with a slow Freecad for design work.

I wonder if a new release of freecad will mitigate the current issue I'm seeing. Right now, I can select multiple shapes in a sketch and extrude them all as a group. For some reason (could be a limitation in Frecad or my inexperience with it), when I create ShapeStrings and attach them to a shape in the Part Design workbench, I seem to get an error when I try select multiple strings and extrude them as a group. Instead, I have to extrude each ShapeString individually. The first few are fast, but the more ShapeStrings I extrude, the longer each one takes. One of the recent designs I worked on had 80 strings to extrude. By the time I got to the last few it was taking about 7 minutes to extrude each.

I've seen this kind of behavior before with other applications. I once worked on a MS Word application that inserted hundreds of pictures from JPEG files into the document. It turns out that each time you insert a picture into work, it runs the entire document through the print driver. So, while it is not noticeable when inserting a few dozen pictures, when you get in to the hundreds, things slow down significantly.

I guess I'm just rambling as I wait for the 3d printer to arrive...

 

[yoderjac]

Well, No Luck today. The printer ended up about a hour away at a Fedex facility by the end of the day. Fedex has not provided a new date/time for delivery, but I presume it will be sometime tomorrow.

 

[yoderjac]

I'm not to happy with Fedex! The printer was scheduled to be here yesterday between 10:00 am and 2:00pm. It never showed. It was rescheduled for today between 11:00 am and 3:00 pm. Around 3:00 pm, the tracking said the driver was in the area and showed him about 1 mile away. I saw him make several stops going in different directions between 3:00 pm and 4:00 pm. Then suddenly, the map disappeared and now the estimate was "By the end of the day". About 7:45 PM, I saw lights coming up the driveway. They stopped about 1/2 way up the 1/4 mile gravel drive. The lights stopped and the truck turned around evidently and the lights disappeared. A few minutes later, the tracking said it had been delivered and showed a picture.

The box was left unprotected (no plastic bag or anything) back along the hard top road! I have no issues with UPS deliveries, but Fedex Sucks here!

Ok, rant over! At least I got it.

Having never done any of this before, I went slow and watched a setup video as I unboxed and set it up. It took me an hour or so. The unit was very nicely packaged. Much of the unit and parts appear to be 3D printed. I could not figure out how to set it up with the computer only. It wants to see a smart phone app. Not finding any help online, I broke down, loaded the app on my smart phone, finished setting it up, and then uninstalled the app.

Everything went smoothly from there. After updating firmware and calibrating the unit again, I did a test print with one of the canned prints, a benchy. One of the features of this unit is that it records a timelapse video of the build. Here it is:

 

[yoderjac]

The neighbor boy came over yesterday afternoon and we worked together to make an ornament for his mom for Christmas.

 

[yoderjac]

My first functional project was for the printer itself. Right now, I am printing with PLA and PETG which are pretty safe, but in the future I hope to print with some more advanced engineering filaments that can create toxic fumes. I won't be using them until we are in the new house and I set up and external vent for it. Another thing I found out about 3D printers is that they poop a lot. Each time a filament is changed the machine needs to purge a section of old filament. There is a hole on the back of the printer called the poop shoot. Waste plastic comes flying out of there hits the wall behind the printer and scatters everywhere on the floor.

So, I decided to design a combination venting connection and poop shoot cover. I created pockets in the faceplate and learned how to pause the printer so I could insert rare earth magnets in the slots. This worked out very well.

I printed this out of PETG since it is more heat resistant than PLA. The hole on the left side exposes the poop shoot. On the faceplate above the poop shoot you can see a small lip. I had heard of some folks getting the poop shoot clogged for some reason. The cover only needs to deflect the poop, so I thought printing it as a separate part and hanging it from the lip was the best course. Here it is with the poop deflector installed.

I made the deflector out of PLA since it is not direct attached and insulated with the faceplate. I simply put a small cardboard box under it to collect the poop.

 

[yoderjac]

I'm starting to find this 3d printing useful! I have a utility sink in the barn that we use when butchering. I put skirting on it and a heater under it plugged into a thermostat. The thermostat died and I had the faucet freeze a couple weeks ago. The big issue was removing the old faucet. It was install in the utility sink before the sink was installed and plumbed. With all the plumbing installed, it was really tight working under the sink. I tried a couple of the tools for removing the old style faucet nuts and then realized that this faucet had the new stye with the metal washer and screws above the nut. I could not even get my head far enough back to see up there let alone get a screwdriver up there to remove the screws and remove the nut. My only option would have been to tear out all the plumbing and sink and start over just to replace the faucet.

Then I got an idea. It is a cheap plastic utility sink. I got out the angle grinder and cutoff tool and just cut a rectangle out of the top of the sink around the faucet. I could then disconnect the supply lines and lift out the old faucet.

So, how do I install a new one and be able to replace it in the future? 3D printing to the rescue. I simply printed a cover for the hole I cut out. I used long supply lines so I could feed them through the rectangular cut out. I could then install the new faucet in the 3D printed over and connect the supply lines to it. I could then use old fashion toggle bolts to connect the patch to the sink. That way, if I have a future issue, I can simply remove the toggle bolts and the faucet and patch come right out.

Here is a zoom in on the patch. I ran out of the filament I was using part way through the print which is why the bottom part is grey instead of white:

Since it is a wet area, I replaced the toggle bolts with stainless steel bolts and used stainless steel washers.