That would be because they are the boogeymen this election cycle.

If that’s all you’re doing you can probably get away with belts. The laser engraving, for sure. Most of the commercial diode laser options are already belt driven.

A CNC for what, milling? If so, I agree with the others here. Using belts to drive a milling machine is likely to result in too much backlash to be viable. The entire point of ballscrews is that they’re (reasonably) proof against backlash, even moreso than regular lead screws. We can get away with it on our printers because in normal operation the print head and nozzle are never supposed to touch anything so it doesn’t matter. For milling, backlash in your movement system will cause your tool to kick itself off of the workpiece when its edges touch it (i.e. hundreds/thousands of times per minute) which will make it chatter, result in lousy finishes and accuracy on your parts at best, and most likely wind up with you breaking a lot of bits.

Maybe you could get away with it if all you’re doing it routering wood, or something. The moment metal enters the equation, forget it.

The key to milling is rigidity, rigidity, rigidity. If you are having chatter problems, accuracy problems, tool breakage problems, basically any kind of problem, nine times out of ten you’ll wind up tracing it back to backlash and/or your machine or clamping arrangement not being rigid enough in some capacity.

I tried to do an ABS print at PLA temperature once. That sure didn’t work. Vise-versa is also an interesting time, especially if you have the lid on the enclosure shut. If you think you’ve ever seen heat creep, try having PLA in the extruder but running it at 260°C and the chamber heater on. The resultant jam required stripping the entire extruder head down to its individual components and prying it apart in the process, but I put it all back together and it still works. I didn’t even have any screws left over by the time I was done.

Like all Qidi X-Max 3 owners will eventually do at some point, I also once homed my machine without the steel build plate installed. This causes the machine to helpfully drill the nozzle straight into the soft magnetic surface between it and the heater plate. I shaved the high points off of the crater with a straight razor and continued to run that plate without any problems for several months after that. You’d never notice the difference, despite the hole in it.

Also my usual left field advice of making sure nothing is stuck to the underside of your build plate, nor trapped in between the plate and the bed. I’ve gotten bit by that one before, as I have recounted several times. Tiny scraps of filament trapped in between, or whatever. That will cause high spots in unexpected places.

My old Galaxy S5 would work without the battery, including bootup. So it’s not entirely unexpected that other phones could also do so. I would say I can’t imagine who would take the time out out of their day to just talk out their ass and claim something like this wouldn’t work without trying it first. Except then I remember this is the internet, and people do that all the time.

Regardless, good on you for making this all work!

Now I’m really curious. Did you make some sort of jig?

For adhesion, I prefer to apply a layer of Kapton/polyamide tape to my print bed. You can get it online in big square sheets — while using the typical 1" or 2" wide rolls one stripe at a time to cover the bed is technically possible, and I did it in the early days, it’s also a monumental pain in the ass and I advise against it if your budget can stretch to an additional two or three dollars to get the square stuff.

Forget glue stick. It’s messy, it produces an uneven thickness, the tubes dry out at inopportune moments, and it’s damn near impossible apply both evenly and also in an area that will actually correctly cover the entire footprint of your part. Instead, use cheap hair spray. Aqua Net seems to work best for me. The stuff in the pink cans; the absolute cheapest variety.

Note that on a Kapton surface your adhesion agent is also a release agent for certain materials, most especially Nylon and to a lesser extent PETG. Having that barrier in between your actual Kapton surface and your part will prevent it from molecularly bonding to your plate like the goddamned sword in the stone, forcing you to say several choice cuss words and re-tape your plate (as well as spend an entertaining afternoon scraping or sanding bits of Kapton tape off of the bottom of your print). Kapton and Nylon are both polyamides.

PLA, TPU, ABS/ASA, and polycarbonate can be printed directly onto bare Kapton depending on your level of audacity and/or bravery, especially in the case of the latter two. ABS is infamous for warping and the corners may lift off your bed without adhesive, or indeed even with adhesive… Even if the initial layer stuck to the plate perfectly well.

Note that you will have to raise your Z offset slightly if you apply tape to your bed. I.e., ideally by the thickness of the tape. You might find that you also want to raise your nozzle about 0.015-0.02mm if you’ve applied a layer of whatever adhesive, and lower it back down after you clean it off. Yes, the infinitesimally thin layer of hair spray will impact your first layer height provided your machine is accurate enough that its first layer offset is not a crapshoot on a per-print basis to begin with.

That sounds like a capital-N alignment Nightmare, so good on you for getting that figured out!

I think it’s less to do with retaining heat than the fact that the lower temperature printing materials like PLA and TPU will readily adhere even to a cold part, so the time in between nozzle passes is irrelevant. You could add to a PLA/TPU print with a layer time of 10 or 15 seconds or, if you prefer, tomorrow. In fact, with the zooty new printers when using PLA they have whole-enclosure forced air cooling to cool the part off as fast as possible to aid with overhangs and bridging, and prevent sagging when printing fast and thus at high(er) temperatures.

As you have observed, TPU has a ridiculously high layer adhesion in exchange for (or more likely, because of) its rotten temperature stability. It’s also very sticky as a result of its thermal properties, which is also why it strings so durn much.

I dunno how OP did it but you can override your machine’s normal travel limit parameters in your slicer settings. Often the nozzle can physically travel further than the bounds of the build plate and is actually limited by hitting its rail endstops (or limit switches!) or striking some other part of your machine.

My Qidi can position the nozzle about 20mm beyond all four sides of the plate before it hits anything, but on the left and right sides it needs to be above z height 10mm or so to clear the Z axis gantries, and at the front and rear it’s just empty space. So you can’t print on the bed in that area because there is no bed. But if your object were shaped as such you could put overhangs out there in no man’s land. It would be risky, perhaps, but you could.

No, but I’ve done both polycarbonate and Nylon, or at least PA-6.

So far I’ve been getting the most use out of my Qidi X-Max 3, although it appears they’re no longer producing or supporting it. It predates the current multi-material schemes but it’s been able to print every funky high temperature engineering material I’ve tried to throw at it thus far. I’d really like to get some kind of tool changer machine to replace or supplement it at some point but it doesn’t seem like any of those are worth a damn for high temperature materials.

In the meantime I’ve just been using it to make stuff like this and driving myself bats with manual filament changes instead.

Well, it’s interesting to see that Seamonkey is still around. It’s what the Netscape suite mutated into before Firefox kind of became the main line descendant of that whole lineage. I used their WSIWYG web page editor back when I was a teen script kiddie and the state of the art in web design was still to use tables for everything.

I finally gave in and installed Waterfox on my own machine today. I hate to admit it, but having used it for my regular workflow (i.e. actually at work) for the last few hours so far it seems like what base Firefox should be. And arguably still was up until two or three years ago, although I suppose minus the Pocket integration BS that they were doing at that time.

The trouble with all of these forks is that they outright rely on regular Firefox to continue to exist upstream, and if Mozilla tanks and takes down Firefox as a whole all of the forks will by association go with it. I didn’t want to actually abandon Mozilla’s version because their user numbers seem to be tenuous enough as it is. But at this rate I think I’m going to switch our office over to Waterfox in the next couple of days regardless.

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If this includes any information anyone enters into any type of medical service portal this is an instant HIPPA violation and these guys need to be federally prosecuted straight into the dirt. There may be other regulations that apply to this as well, e.g. those related to the banking sector. Never mind the inherent security implications in basically any workplace.

You do not log a user’s keystrokes or text entry. Ever. You know who does do that? Malware.

There’s also:

!printmything@lemmy.world

Get connected with helpful Lemmy nerds who can print your thing for you. Including, not at all coincidentally, yours truly. (Shill, shill, shill.)

Not if you didn’t miss.

Oh, man. He must have git got by Candlejack. I hate it when tha

I had the extruder in my Qidi apart just last night because I had the tip of a piece of ABS snap off inside during a filament change. I found a bunch of dust presumably from various instances of filament grinding from the last few months, probably due to e.g. running the hotend at the wrong temperature for the filament due to being a dummy. It happens occasionally.

It’s not too tough to access on my machine but one of these years I will remember that you need to drop the heater block assembly out first, and then remove the gear cover. Just… not this time.

Apparently several people have gotten themselves added since the initial reveal of the list by deliberately razzing Mr. Patrick via private message, among other things. I imagine he is also running automated scraping tools to seek out people for his self-styled version of “non-normie” behavior (i.e. keywords) to block as well.