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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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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Suggestions here and elsewhere to have no infill on tall structural components that will have large flat surfaces such as large boxes and bins is hilariously bad advice. Yes, “StReNgTh aCtChUlLy cOmEs fRoM ThE WaLlS,” but unless you plan to use an absurd number of perimeters and probably not even then, you absolutely need to have some infill to connect the inner and outer walls, otherwise they will be prone to warp and collapse in on each other. If your item will be as tall as you suggest, this is likely to happen before the print even finishes. Given the shape of the bottom of most Gridfinity objects, printing it entirely with no infill is impossible anyway. You can’t have a floor suspended in midair of any significant dimensions without infill underneath it to build on top of.

    You probably don’t need much infill, probably only 5 or 10%. But it’s going to have to be there.

    Don’t overthink it. I print these relatively giant Gridfinity drawer shells standing upright, and I use 10% gyroid infill, 2 wall perimeters, and 3 top and bottom layers. It works just fine and they’re perfectly rigid enough to stack at least four units tall (the most I’ve bothered to hook together to far) while loaded to the gills with probably more weight than is wise worth of knives and nuts/bolts.

    I tried to print one without infill precisely once, and it collapsed and failed after about 30mm worth of height had been built up. This was with PLA which is the most rigid of the commonly available printable materials; the issue would be even worse with other plastics.


  • Theoretically, but it would probably be slower than dogshit if you tried to do it over e.g. USB, and the administration would probably also not be pleased with you spending the entire exam with an external storage device conspicuously bunged into your computer.

    You could grab a cheap (relatively, these days) low-ish capacity SSD in whatever flavor your machine takes and install Windows on that with your primary drive removed and safely stored away somewhere, though, and then just swap them back when you’re done.

    If you want something to do with your secondary SSD afterwards there are enclosures you can get that’ll convert an NVME SSD into a super fast USB flash drive sort of arrangement, albeit typically dangling on the end of a short cable rather than sticking directly into the port, which makes a good modern day stand-in for those portable laptop hard drive enclosures nerds used to carry around in the early 2000s.










  • Yeah, at this rate it’s basically just a tinkering project for the grins. Whenever I do bust out my SX130 these days I use the stock firmware with it because I can’t be bothered.

    The 130 is a little monster of a point-and-shoot, though. I’m always pleased and amazed with the quality of pictures it can take provided whatever you’re doing doesn’t require them to be a zillion megapixels. I bought it new back in the day and I have no idea what I paid for it. I think the original MSRP was $249.99 in 2009 or whatever.