Measuring with the printer is an excellent idea. When in jog mode, mine displays the nozzle coordinates right on the screen.

I was considering that a truly dedicated nut could figure out which layer the print failed at (possibly approximately) and hand edit the gcode for the print to just replace all the layers up until the failed one with Z axis move up to that height. I think that would be problematic, though, because on my machine at least the model still being on the bed would definitely be in the way of the print head homing at the beginning of the print, and I don’t know if there’s any way to force it to skip that part of the procedure. Failure seems likely, and the penalty for failure is high.

Just printing the remaining half of the model and supergluing the parts together seems like a better idea.

My Qidi has a heated chamber and can allegedly do it stock, and I’ve had an unopened spool of pure Nylon sitting in the printer cabinet for over a year.

But I’m chicken.

If your nozzle can withstand it, glass filled is way easier to print.

Your slicer should also be able to compensate for this already.

PLA only shrinks about 0.3% which is negligible unless you are designing with super tight clearances. A 6mm hole, for instance, will be out 0.018mm which is probably scraping against the XY resolution limits of most consumer 3D printers anyhow.

Other materials can definitely shrink more. ABS is harder to manage than PLA, but for instance Nylon/PA’s shrink rate is comparatively immense – around 2%. The various engineering polymers that are filled with something like carbon or glass fibers actually tend to shrink less than their raw counterparts.

Image upload limit is 500kb per image

Cripes. I’d dissolve like the Wicked Witch of the West.

If it were me, I probably would not be able to resist the urge to make whatever inserts you develop compatible with a Gridfinity baseplate, because I am that kind of nerd.

To create perfectly console-shaped two dimensional inserts, or at least close enough, I would start by laying each system flat on a piece of paper and tracing around it with a narrow bodied mechanical pencil. Stick this in your scanner and make an image out of it, and then trace over that image at scale in the CAD software of your choice (FreeCAD is… free). This will automatically come with a built in amount of clearance in the amount of half of the width of the body of your pencil.

Just make a flat base with a wall sticking up maybe 2-3mm thick or more if you feel like it, to roughly half the height of each object. You can put some gaps in it if you prefer to have places to grab the item directly.

And for anyone who winds up struggling with this when trying to gauge their own printer, make sure this option is enabled:

This is in Prusa/Slic3r and its derivatives. If this is disabled, the final outer wall perimeter can wind up being pushed out by some fraction of the width of the wall behind it, which will have the net effect of shrinking vertical holes in your model (and other critical clearances in the X/Y dimensions) by an unpredictable amount.

As long as you stay within its plastic deformation limit, “many cycles” should not matter.

PLA’s downfall for flexible design elements is permanent deflection. It cannot be used on anything that is expected to stay in its tensioned state for anything more than a few seconds. This is why PLA works for catapults and toothpick guns and latches that have a single position rest state where the flexible element is relaxed. If you leave it under tension, though, even just for a few hours, it will not spring back fully. Eventually, it just won’t spring back at all.

Through much testing (read: slowly pissing myself off) I determined in the course of developing my Rockhopper that ABS is the best commonly available choice for permanently or semi-permanently loaded printed spring fixtures – at least out of what most normal and sane people can print with their hobby level machines. Even PETG is better than PLA in that respect, but PLA was useless for me.

Weight is really the only reason, but even then I think that’s self-defeating on a bicycle.

Believe it or not, a chain and sprocket drive is actually the most efficient method in terms of energy transmission losses. And when it’s you physically pedaling your bicycle, that’s kind of important. Turning any significant fraction of your pedaling input into heat rather than forward locomotion is kind of a raw deal, which is why even fancy high end bicycles are still chain driven even to this day. A chain drive loses 1-4% of energy in the driveline whereas as comparable belt drive is more in the order of 9-15%.

Print time: 10 minutes. Time for 2048x2048 point “bed” auto mesh: four hours.

FWIW the default PETG profile on my printer doesn’t even run the part cooling fan at all except during bridges. PETG has a very narrow window of suitable temperatures typically between 240 and 260° C, and if you’re printing with your nozzle at 240 you’re already scraping the lower end of that range. And unlike PLA, especially the modern blends we have now that are full of additives to make the stuff easier to print, there is no leeway. PETG will essentially solidify instantly once it falls below that critical temperature point. Not only underextruding severely (or not extruding at all) but likely also failing to bond to the layer underneath with whatever does manage to make it out of the nozzle.

On my machine you can hear it when this happens, a least. The extruder gears click like mad whenever there’s a failure to extrude at any significant volume.

not sketchy Chinese spyware

People are going to suggest Bambu printers, but if avoiding Chinese spyware is one of your criteria I would advise avoiding anything and everything by Bambu, regardless of how shiny it is.

Look into the Qidi I-Fast, which is a dual extruder machine, i.e. with two separate toolheads. Its multi material capability is superior to the Bambus in that regard, working more similarly to your work’s Prusa, albeit only supporting two materials at a time. Qidi is also Chinese but I have owned two of their printers so far (an OG X-Plus, and a current Gen 3 X-Max) and I can find no evidence that they engage in any spying or other misbehavior. The I-Fast is $1800 USD right now which is well within your budget.

Honestly, for $5000 you can buy a lot of printer, or multiple printers. Plan B I think would be to just get the Prusa XL as you have already suggested, which is a sound strategy. Me, if I ever manage to accumulate enough Prusameters to do so, I am 100% cashing them in for a Prusa XL.

Despite claims to the contrary (largely by their manufacturers and fanboys, myself sometimes included) there is no such thing as any 3D printer from any brand using any technology that is truly plug-and-play, and 100% problem free. The damn things are inherently full of moving parts, tiny clearances, consumables, and wear items which will all at some point or another require your attention either via tinkering, tuning, or occasional parts replacement.

A little vacuum pump, like a carburetor on a motorcycle from the 70’s? Hell if I know, but that’s my idea.

I scanned your QR code.

…I should have known.

I have used OpenSCAD for various things, and I am a programmer by trade (at least partially) but it still breaks my brain. I just do absurd things with FreeCAD formulae instead.

I see what you did there.

I haven’t delved deeply into the changelog or anything. The headline features are indeed integrating much of realthunder’s toponaming fix into the mainline release as well as including an assembly workbench by default which I believe is also realthunder’s. This is pretty big, because realthunder’s fork was perennially behind the mainline release by several versions, and now the main reason for using it renders that moot. So that’s nice. I generally work in such a way as to not get burned by the toponaming problem anyway, but I guess I get the warm and fuzzies knowing I may avoid unexpectedly being bitten in the ass at least once now.

The UI has been changed around a bit, in particular many things that used to be out in the open in toolbars are now in overflow menus which is probably beneficial for people who don’t design on a 4k monitor. But I do, so that doesn’t excite me any.

The renderer appears to have been updated. When you change views now, your viewpoint animates to the new view instead of just snapping to it. It seems it does a better job of keeping things in frame as well, both when you open a sketch that’s not currently on your viewplane and also when you switch views. Additionally, when you’re free rotating your view there’s a little red dot that shows your rotation point now. This was a bit opaque in previous versions and now it appears to default to originating where you clicked, whereas previously your rotation center was… whatever the hell random place it felt like putting it, near as I can figure.

You can undock the “Tasks” panel now and even close it outright, which I like because I never use it for anything and previous versions incessantly switched you out of your tree view and into Tasks e.g. when switching between workbenches.

The measurement tool is much easier to work with now, i.e. it works how you expect it should have worked in the first place, and also produces labels that are significantly easier to read. I avoided using it before because it was such a pain in the ass. It’s usable now.

Every measurement now defaults to whatever your projects default units are, even if you don’t specify one. This kinda-sorta worked before, but things like formulas would absolutely insist that you append “mm” or “in” or whatever to every single number or they’d break, which was deeply irritating. Now it just works as you’d expect, which again feels like how it should have worked in the first place.

Help’s not an add-on anymore. I have no idea why it ever was. I never use it, but once again: It should have worked the way it does now all along.

I notice you can drag things around inside the tree and more of them allow themselves to be reordered that way, although not all. Notably not sketches within a body, which is an issue when e.g. doing lofts, and the order of the sketches matters. So there’s improvement there, but still more work to be done. (You can still reorder them with the right click and “move after another object” option. But it’s clunky.)

The start page is different. It still doesn’t track the same recent items there versus what’s in your drop down file menu, though, and I still have no idea what that’s about. It also tracks exported files like .stl’s as “recently” accessed items, which I guess is technically correct but I suspect is also beyond useless for 99.9% of workflows.

All in all, there’s plenty of stuff I like about it more than I did 0.22, and not much new or changed that really pisses me off or messes up my workflow.

If you don’t get yourself a pair of smoked lenses and go Doc Botnik with these, I will be sorely disappointed.

Re: Pets. I have three cats and I’ve been doing well with my Qidi X-Max 3, which has a fully enclosed filament path even in stock configuration. And mine still does now in its current getup, where I feed it directly from my filament dryer.

The PLA I currently use near-exclusively is Elegoo Rapid PLA+ which at least when you buy it in the bulk 4 packs is $12.99 per 1kg spool. I’ve occasionally used other off brand sub-$15 PLA filaments and not gotten screwed. Cheap bullshit filament can be OK if you are willing to commit to thoroughly drying it out before use and can have its uses if you need one decorative thing in a particular weird color and don’t feel like shelling out for an oddball. For me, the Elegoo stuff is as cheap enough and is a known good quantity so I don’t see much reason to mess with success unless I have to.

You’re right about TPU being a specialty material, but for the times I have needed it, it has definitely come in clutch. Its unique mechanical properties have allowed me to make various weird gaskets (most recent being a replacement air intake gasket for an old motorcycle), adapter boots, bumpers, buffers, and most recently this thing. TPU exhibits incredible layer adhesion – you can make parts out of it that are basically completely isotropic, even with a bog standard filament machine – which turn out to be damn near indestructible provided you don’t need them to tolerate high heat or be rigid in any way whatsoever. It’s a rather silly choice to use for just making static objects, though. For printing your low poly Pikachus and Deadpool busts and Yoda bobbleheads or whatever the hell, PLA is much easier to use.

I think a lot of people get caught up in the trap of thinking of your material choices being a “ranking,” with the cheaper and easier to print polymers being lower on the totem pole and assuming that the more expensive and harder to print ones are “better.” This is not necessarily the case. Every material choice (excepting various strange exotic materials some of which have no realistic purpose other than showing off) has its advantages and disadvantages that may be a consideration depending on your application. Boring old cheap PLA, for instance, is actually the most rigid of the commonly available materials that are possible for ordinary people to print without non-industrial printers. It also confers the second best layer adhesion strength out of the rigid polymers in that same category (behind TPU which is not rigid, and arguably polycarbonate which is a pain in the ass to print and presents it own other problems). Really, the only failings PLA has is a very low temperature resistance and susceptibility to cold creep.

Honestly IDGAF about Bambu, but these patents are for technologies clearly used by other manufacturers as well. Stratasys is just picking on Bambu because Bambu is successful, and they’re smelling a payout.

It is in the best interest of everyone in the hobby – not just manufacturers – that Stratasys loses.

I second the Qidi recommendation. Both of mine have been champions thus far.