Bambu X1C fixed

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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.

Things and stuff

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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.

Fire place, fire sale

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The fireplace work didn’t start today due to the rain. They originally rescheduled it for tomorrow but then the person scheduled for tomorrow got sick, so it’ll be Monday at the earliest. … And I just realized that means they scheduled it for Christmas, which seems weird. I’m guessing they’re going to start on Tuesday instead. Which is the same day the plumbers were planning to start on my bathroom. Oy.

Anyway, my big blue couch is finally gone, and so is my resin printer. Now I just need to do some more decluttering of my living room (and find a home for the crap that I was keeping on the surviving couch), and also figure out where the heck I’m going to keep my folding treadmill because it’s a little too tall to go under the red couch. I suppose I could prop it up by a couple inches with some riser feet or something but that feels iffy to me.

I had briefly thought I was going to maybe set up a gym space downstairs (for the treadmill and my DDR setup) but there just isn’t room for it down there either. The treadmill hasn’t really been all that enjoyable to use anyway, though, so maybe I’ll just sell it in January when everyone’s suddenly interested in getting exercise. For now it’s stashed awkwardly behind my couch, and preventing me from setting up my cozy fireplace area the way I want to.

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House updates and other miscellani

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My new roof is finally getting installed. It sure is loud and poundy. Supposedly this is a two-day project so theoretically they are around halfway done. Unlike most home renovation stuff I can’t easily take photos showing the progress. Oh well.

Also after trying to work on some music in my newly-rearranged basement I was finding that having the computer desk in the center of the back “wall” with keyboard way off to the left looked cool but it made actually working on music a major drag, since I couldn’t just turn and start recording, I’d have to get up and take a few steps over, and that made my workflow really frustrating. So since I couldn’t work on music today anyway (because noise) I reoriented stuff to be a bit more like how it used to be, with the desk on the left and the keyboard to the right of it, and now it’s way more comfortable to work on things.

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Find me on Printables

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I used to use Makerbot’s Thingiverse as my 3D printing sharing platform of choice, but it’s gone way downhill over the last few years. However, Printables, run by Prusa (makers of a very popular 3D printer), is quite nice, and provides way more functionality and way less jank. I’ve been using it as my primary source of STL files for quite some time now, and I’ve stopped bothering with uploading to Thingiverse entirely at this point.

I’d love to see more people move over there. It’s a much nicer community with better sharing, remixing, and commentary, and it’s also way faster and more reliable than Thingiverse. What’s also really nice is if you already have a Thingiverse profile, they will automatically import all your stuff over, too!

Anyway, check out my profile there.

Studio reorg, day 1

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The air was clear enoughâ„¢ today (AQI in the upper 80s, which is still no fun for me to be outside but that’s good enough for being in the basement) and I got goaded along by some folks on the Song Fight! discord to “just do it,” so I decided to start the process of reorganizing stuff.

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