Aaron's Status

6:53 pm

3D printing

We have a kitchen drawer full of spices. Most people probably have some kind of a cabinet, rack, or shelf for all these spices that accumulate and we used to use a cabinet but now they’re in a drawer.

I think we saw the drawer idea at my in-law’s house or something. The real plus is that it’s more space efficient; if you use a rack in a cabinet, you’ll never use the whole depth of the cabinet because you want to be able to see all of the containers at once.

Anyway, I tried buying retail drawer spice racks and they all pretty much suck. The main problem is that spice jars are all different and we are unwilling to decant every new spice into a custom jar so that they can all be the same. Yes I am aware that some demented people do this.

3D printing to the rescue! What better reason to design and print my own spice container racks specifically for our drawers? I started a couple of days ago. I have a design that I am pretty happy with for the large ones, which cleverly accommodates both square and round containers.

There are a couple of flaws; I designed it for one container, figuring that I would simply glue them to each other and that will work but I might like to have some kind of registration notch or something to really align them. Also the lid extends off the back, which is fine, but it means that the whole thing could theoretically slide closer to the back of the drawer than I’d want it to.

These are minor nits, though. Printing just four of these guys takes like 10 hours so I ought to get committed to the design before I finish the nine or so that I need.

While printing these I also attempted to re-print another household piece that I designed years ago (unrelated) and ran it on the older Prusa MK2S with the new organic supports and it failed in a spaghetti mess. I tried again with different PLA and it failed again.

I think the MK2S is simply not in good enough physical shape to do these intricate designs, or the build plate is too worn, or something else. But at this point, you can hardly even replace parts on this guy because it’s so old. Prusa doesn’t make the MK2 series build plates anymore because the whole world has moved on to magnetic spring steel, which is so much better by far.

That of course got me thinking, well, maybe I need another new printer, right?

I did look at Bambu. Everyone is using Bambu Labs printers now and they seem amazing. But what really irks me about the whole thing is that it’s tied to their cloud and their slicer and it all seems quite nice and Adam Savage uses it but what if it suddenly doesn’t? What if I want to print offline? What if I don’t want to sell my soul to the devil?

I love Prusa printers because they’re open source, support printing from external software like Octoprint, and offline printing is a core feature. Prusa isn’t going to sell you something that they can remotely brick. It’s a printer, you can use it how you want to, and that’s what I’m into.

The MK4S is claimed to be about as fast as the Bambu Labs X1, but it achieves it by using a higher flow nozzle rather than purely faster acceleration speeds. There’s more research to be done here but the MK4S would be a nice replacement for the MK2S and would set me up with both an MK3 and MK4 to run simultaneously.

I’m still really happy with the MK3S, which is tons quieter, more accurate, and has the spring steel build plate compared to my old MK2S.

The real question is, do I want to get the MK4S MMU and mess with multi-color or multi-material prints? That could be a whole winter project right there.

Yoga

I finally bit the bullet and got into a second yoga class. With the climbing twice a week, it’s felt like I need time for my back to fully recover after the exertion, so I haven’t gone since that first class several weeks ago.

This week I felt like I was at 90% or so on my back so I made the commitment and went. It was a good class, it was challenging in parts (the flexibility stuff is always challenging for me pretty much across the board), but not super intense. A nice way to spend an hour at the end of the day.

Only four people, including me, showed up for this one. Two older dudes (older than me, anyway) who were in the first class I did and appear to be friends with one another and certainly regulars at the studio, and another gal who was a newbie like me.

I think the first class I took was maybe on a Monday? Perhaps the Thursday classes are just less popular, but I think we’re going to find out. I still have three classes left on my five-pack that I originally bought, so unless I feel actual pain I’m going to push myself to show up on Thursdays.

I do feel sore from it, but I’ll take a day to assess whether that is a sign of something worse or just muscle fatigue.