Always tooting for th'antihero @Momentrabbit@awoo.space

Home. I'm too tired to be playing at this job right now, wasting as much metal as I get right. I only get eight hours of focus a day, and it ran out seven hours ago. Grab seven hours of sleep and a showrt, go in earlier, get it done before the world wakes up.

On the other hand, been at work since 6 and 13 hours later no idea when I'll be done.

Heee.

Feel like I'm learning a lot in the new position. Going to have to take up weightlifting as a hobby, as reloading the mainspring-unwinder is a heavy thing, and happens many times a day.

Nobody said bending rules was easy.

Well! Good news. Finally moving to maintaining the sub-orbital doom beam and rule-bending by degrees as my full-time position(s), rather than intermittent.

Bad news? My day now starts earlier, if at least consistently so. But I really ought to have been abed about an hour ago... <.<

Still, it's the best job I've ever had. I'm looking forward to developing some task mastery.

G'night, all. Dream well.

The scribe is, technically, a knurled aluminum stylus-holder for 1/8" diameter carbide inserts. Works fine for other 1/8" shank tooltips: currently have a .1mm double-flute endmill installed so I can pretend to be a tiny CNC router.

What. Don't judge me.

(whirrrrrr)

There are hardware stores, and then there are places that supply tools to the manufacturing industry. The latter has things like keys to a Jacobs taper 33 chuck in stock - and a $25 minimum order, and ordering techniques that haven't changed since the early 80s. Involving paperwork.

So I bought two chucks and a carbide-tipped scribe for work. Minor inconvenience for precise stuff on demand. n.n (Once I just bought $25 of hacksaw blades. They're good blades, Bront...)

My key fits my chuck *perfectly*.

This is not, sadly, a euphemism. But it makes me happy, nonetheless.

... or I can puzzle at it online for a while longer, figure out that a J33 chuck with a 1/4 pilot should take a Jacobs 3666 key - which explains a lot - and find a local supplier so I can just get a new key tomorrow afternoon. Hooray. Bed now.

Drawer front falls off TMoTM's vanity. Turns out they've reattached it so many times that the backside is basically bored out. Easy fix, drill out the holes, install dowels, glue, trim, drill and install proper machine screws. But!

Can't find the damn drill press chuck key.

Never liked this press's chuck or key. Wobbly fit, chewed up more knuckles than I could ever hope to count. So, now I'm looking for a new J33 taper 3-jaw keyed chuck.

And they wonder why I never get simple repairs done...

The print was a complete success. o.O 350,000 faces, 8" head to toes, 8 hour unattended. Supports broke off cleanly, and for a .2mm vertical print resolution on a .4mm extruder, the curvature was quite smooth. Finished surface was like wood grain.

Sadly, the model is *way* too complex to simplify down to something easily edited - but there's the failure from which I shall learn. Next model will start simple, not tool-generated.

Well, it's been a few hours, lets see how that print is DEAR GHOD IT'S THIRD IMPACT https://awoo.space/media/AQnkq-JdVnz0F6CpCVg

The printing continues.

... and then I spill a can of diet cola all over the keyboard. This was not a failure modality I planned for. >.<

(Although it *is* alarmingly close to a 'Weird Science' style origin story...)

Reprap-based 3D printers speak a dialect of gcode, which CNC machines have been using for decades. It's a human-parseable series of control instructions and locations - point to point in 3space, extruding filament along the way. The more complicated the object being printed, the bigger the file. The rings were a few hundred kilobytes.

Tonight, I'm trying a 30mb file generated off a MakeHuman model. I don't expect it to work, per se: I do hope the failure is informative. n.n

Last night's print. Second try: first didn't fully laminate, so I ran the second try slower without the fan shroud. Spins ok, for a one-piece print. Inner wheels don't have enough mass to really rotate freely.

I think I'm at the point where the printer is adequately tuned for production. Now to throw myself into modelling software... https://awoo.space/media/dShdv_rI-XyQZFPJlAI

The music of the spheres. Well, the music of circles being slowly traced by a pair of stepper motors. Close enough, to my ear. ( https://awoo.space/media/6keqhY3Me-NubL3TljQ

I always get a giggle out of seeing authorfriends 'Playing Scrivener' on Discord. The multi-author online chat must be a thing. "500 word bonus!" "Spy sapping my novella!" "Dammit, c'mon, move the manuscript!" "MORE ELLIPSES! MORE ELLIPSES!"

http://geargenerator.com/

Oooooh. Minor cognitohazards for the cog-n-gear crowd.

According to the printer, I've extruded about 913m of filament since I started exploring this tech in December. I'm simultaneously surprised it's so short, and yet... a *kilometer* of plastic output. Wow. o.O

The brace itself is from Thingiverse, credit for design goes to Leo Nutz - https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1852358

Here's the brace installed, viewed from above. It's screwed into the threaded rods that form the base of the printer, braces the Y-axis stepper against the middle strut. https://awoo.space/media/4S9yj9pV2SHi7nhrkAA

Next step: print the more-complicated _front_ brace. Perhaps tomorrow. n.n