busybee fluffy rambles

Oh yeah, earlier today the original contractor came by to look at things. He’s agreed to do the finishing-up work for free, and also will be reimbursing me for the plumbing expenses, which is very kind of him. When I showed him what his previous plumber had done he was incredibly shocked by it.

Hopefully the work will be finished up sometime in the next month; unfortunately he’s traveling soon and won’t be back for a few weeks, but he said he will hopefully be able to schedule someone to do the patching-up.

Oh yeah, today the replacement heat bed sensor cable arrived. It was a major pain in the ass to replace. I ended up routing it differently than the manufacturer intended because the factory routing is clearly what causes the conductors to wear down and fail, and anyway doing it the right way would have required basically disassembling the entire printer.

But anyway I have a working main printer again and so I’ve resumed my production run. The current thing I’m making has TPU parts on it and that filament needs to print slowly so I’m keeping the old printer busy with it (since it’s not like the X1C can make it go any faster anyway). During the downtime I did do a couple of prints of the main PETG part and got a reminder of just how bad the old printer is at printing PETG (slow, lots of stringing, etc.) but it at least let me validate the correctness of the threaded insert.

I also have all of my plaster slip casting equipment and material now, so tomorrow I’ll probably print a calibration cube to make a slip cast mold of (and I guess that would be fun to fire as well). It’ll be fun to have anoter tool for creating things, and it’s nice that slip casting can go entirely in parallel with 3D printing aside from printing the templates.

Oh except I just realized I never bought plasticine, but I can get that at Target. I also still need to get the oil soap as well (which I can also get there).

Anyway, based on how obnoxious it was to fix the X1C, I think if I get a third printer for my print farm it’ll be the A1. It’s just as fast as the P1P and is WAY easier to maintain. The downside is that being a bed-slinger it’s still prone to some of the more annoying print defects inherent to that (especially ring artifacts). Also its AMS takes up a hell of a lot of desk space, but I wasn’t planning on getting a second AMS anyway. I mostly use my X1C’s as a fancy dry box, and there’s much cheaper dry boxes out there. It does mean that my multimaterial prints can only happen on the X1C, though, unless I go through the hassle of getting the Palette working again.

Bathroom

Plumbing was supposed to happen today but they somehow forgot to put me on the schedule. Which I found out when I’d called the plumber to find out when they were intending to start, and they had some more questions for me anyway, and it turns out they’d meant to send a new estimate based on what I’d figured out. Hopefully it’ll happen soon.

Fireplace

Fireplace work started today, but the fireplace folks still hadn’t gotten the liner purchased (and couldn’t get it because all the suppliers are still closed), so now I have a chimney with flashing and a crown but no cap, which means if it rains tonight there will be water inside, because for some reason the dude in his infinite wisdom didn’t even cover it with a tarp. Sigh. This particular fireplace contractor isn’t so great at the communicating.

But anyway the old chimney cap did come down and it’s incredibly rusted and shoddy and was very much falling apart so yeah, I’m glad this work got done when it did, before things got way, way worse.

3D printing

I was about to start a production run of the tamping stations, and my printer decided that this would be a perfect time for its bed leveling sensor to fail. So I switched back to my old Artillery Genius for now (oh god it is so slow and the bed is so small¹) and spent all day trying to troubleshoot the sensor. Apparently there’s a pretty common problem with the X1C where the sensor’s cable (a $4 part) tends to fail weirdly. In this case, I think that when it recalibrated because of the firmware update, a marginal connection got shaken loose.

Anyway, so I ordered a $4 cable which had $7 shipping on it, so I ended up ordering a bunch of filament, and then discovered that I apparently have a Bambu filament membership? I’m not sure when I ended up with that. Was it something Bambu gave me for being a Kickstarter backer? I’m not finding any records in my email of having subscribed or being given it. Well, in any case, it means that Bambu’s branded filament is currently cheaper than my usual supplier anyway. But gosh I have a lot of filament now.

In any case, I’m thinking of ramping up my production which means it’d actually be beneficial for me to build an actual print farm, and I’m considering getting a Bambu P1P or P1S to supplement my X1C. But if I do end up pivoting into ceramics I don’t think more printers would be useful, since there my limiting factor is how many plaster molds I have in service and how much stuff I can load up in the kiln up the street.

Oh, and I got my first Etsy sale today! I hope the buyer is happy with their new Timemore catch cup.

I’m feeling like maybe I should have become a plumber, as I’m getting pretty good at figuring out what’s going on behind my shower (in ways that the plumbers who actually came out to look at it and give estimates on seem to have missed). It looks like the problem is just with the connection between the shower head and the valve. It’s possible that with the right tools it’d be possible to just open up the wall a little bit to gain access to the valve side of the pipe to tighten (and maybe re-tape) it, and then the shower head end might only need the drywall to be opened up to have that connection tightened as well. I might not need any retiling at all! That would be ideal, at least.

Anyway this is stuff to go over with the plumber next week.

The plumber who did the “quick fix” and diagnosis on tuesday, incidentally, made a couple of things a lot worse, and I just ended up having to replace my tub spout as well (because he installed it with loc-tite on the faucet end for some reason, even knowing that this was meant to be a temporary fix). Oh well, the one I replaced it with is much nicer looking. The pipe leading to it is a little bit too long now, though. Do I need to cut it down and get a threading tool or something?

Got a second estimate from a plumber today. This one did a much more thorough diagnosis than the first one and he determined that there is definitely a leak between the valve and the tub spout, and pointed out some definite problems left by the contractors. This was a pretty thorough amount of work that took a few hours and cost a chunk of money, but that’ll make the estimation from the remaining plumber (who will be coming on Thursday) a lot more straightforward.

Today’s plumber estimates that the necessary plumbing work will be around $3000, plus however much it costs to redo the tiling. He said there’s tilers that his company works with which might work well although scheduling is difficult at present. And they’d be able to limit the amount of tiling work that needs to be redone, at least.

Anyway on Thursday I should have the final estimate for the plumbing stuff and then I can try working with the bathroom contractor in terms of who’s paying for all this. Or maybe he’d be able to prove the quality of his new crew by doing it for free but I’d have no reason to trust him to do a good job at this point.

Ugh.

This morning’s shower with the exposed drywall confirmed that there is definitely a leak, on the output side of the valve.

Some tile is going to have to be removed and reinstalled. I guess I need to start looking at bathroom contractors again.

There is a fucking leak in the wall behind my bathtub

It is probably yet another fucking hurrah from the shitty goddamn bathroom remodeler folks

It is going to be fucking expensive to fix

Maybe the plumbers will be able to get at the pipes from the side but I’m not optimistic about that

This leak has probably been there for a while but it’s taken this long to be apparent, because it was slowly eroding away the drywall next to the tub and causing the baseboards to swell up

I suspect I’m going to need to sue the contractor for gross negligence

At least I still have plenty of tile left over from the renovation, in case the worst comes to pass and I need to get that wall redone

anyway this guy fucking sucks

It’s December, when people start on the Baby, It’s Cold Outside discourse again.

The song was written in a different era when different idioms were in place. It is not a song about aggressive sexual advances (much less date rape!), it’s a song about an unmarried couple trying to come up with excuses to spend the night together, in a society where that was extremely frowned upon.

There’s a pretty good explanation of it by Pessoa on Genius Lyrics:

In a modern climate, these lines are often seen as Marilyn catching Dean putting a roofie in her drink, followed by simpler date-sexual assault. Dean also defends that his feelings are ostensibly more meaningful than Marilyn’s.

When the song was written in 1944, it was seen as scandalous for women to stay the night with someone who wasn’t their husband. As seen earlier (and later) in the song, the girl has a strong desire to stay with the man, regardless of the social norm—not to mention there’s a strong blizzard outside.

The line “Say, what’s in this drink?” was a common phrase women would use as a way to attribute their deviance to a strong drink. The phrase was originally a nod to the idea that alcohol is “making” them do something unusual when there is actually nothing in the drink—the drink is to blame. In Frank Loesser’s original version, the girl pretends to resist his advancements so she can tell others it wasn’t her fault for deviating from the then-current societal expectations.

There’s also a pretty good discussion about this song in Rolling Stone Magazine.

Also the song was originally written by Frank Loesser to have something he and his wife could sing to their party guests when it was time for them to go the fuck home.