1 and 5: Either should be fine, especially if the seller is reputable and has reviews. Many sells will have a store on multiple sites, but in some cases people will resell other people’s work. See if you can track down the original creator to support them 2: I suspect everyone will want STLs they won’t have to do any processing on. What do I mean? Well, I could give you a STL for a piece that’s massively too large and would need to be split into pieces or a different STL that will be impossible to print well. I suspect print services won’t want to deal with this, will charge for it, and/or you might not be happy with the final outcome 3: If you’re paying someone to print the parts, they will likely have larger format printers. However, this might cost some $$ 5: It depends how thick the designs are and how strong you want them to be (more perimeters = stronger), but keep in mind that you’re also paying for machine time and potentially processing (eg surface finishing, support removal, etc). To get a feel for a quote without buying this design, find some cosplay armor on something like printables and use that for quotes

I had no idea this was even going on, so that’s a potential plus.

Stratasys filed the two lawsuits against Bambu Lab in the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, in August 2024. The company claims that Bambu Lab’s X1C, X1E, P1S, P1P, A1, and A1 mini 3D printers violate ten of its patents. These patents cover common 3D printing features, including purge towers, heated build plates, tool head force detection, and networking capabilities.

I had heard that Stratasys was a bit of a patent troll, but some of those claims are news to me.

Can confirm, klipper does this too. Sincerely, someone who had a few thermistor related wire breaks.

Adding encoders to your steppers, or buying stepper motors with built in encoders, can help a lot but it’s not a cheap solution. It can also be a bit bulky, so packaging them a printer not designed for them can be tricky.

I also free hand. Every once in a while I wish they were more perfectly square, but then I realize I don’t actually care enough to print a fixture and have to deal with attaching/detaching my Weller.

I am a die hard laptop/desktop person but the majority of my outside of work ‘computer’ time is on my phone these days :(

I suggest checking out this post. I have quite a few replies about the voron experience.

TL;DR - agree that a Voron can be a start and walk away printer. Building it will take some time, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but know what you’re getting into. It will take some configuration and tuning to get it printing, but the Voron initial setup guide and Ellis’s print tuning guide are very easy to follow.

From a 2.4 owner.

The word “coffee” is being used very liberally here. Starbucks and company will happily sell you highly sugared drinks for $7. They’ll also sell you “American” (drip) coffee for $2.50, which is still too much but it’s a bit more reasonable.

I was wondering why our clear skies the past few days looked like they had a layer of lake effect cloud cover. This also explains that.

Nice work!

One of the interesting things about modeling and then printing replacement parts is figuring out which features matter (like shaft diameters and spacing in this design) and which you can take some liberties with to make printing easier. For example, for the part on the left you may have been able to add tapered feature to the rod insider to let you print the part standing on the flat bit on the far left without any supports. Another possibility might be trying to get the part to lie lengthwise by modifying the cylinder some as arced parts have deceivingly big overhangs. Perhaps you could give it a small flat spot.

Lead with a shower then have a clean bath?

You’re right that phillips screws are prone to cam out if theres a size mismatch, but it doesn’t stop there. Apply too much torque or have a misshapen screw head or bit and you’re out of luck.

The challenge with ASA and ABS re:warping is chamber temps, not so much bed temperature. Both shrink pretty significantly compared to PLA and if your chamber is too cool and/or your print is too big or has difficult geometry you’re going to be in for a rough time.

I’ve lived at this latitude in a couple different states. From what I’ve experienced, the climate in the mid west is similar to that of PA, NY, NJ, CT, RI, etc. Snowfall changes vary radically based on your proximity to a lake and generally speaking anything west of PA is super flat.

To me, the nice thing about SE MI is it the size of the metro and the quantity of things to do within it. The people are also a bit more friendly than the east coast, which is nice too.

The fence is about 6.5 feet tall and seems to keep deer out pretty well. Our garden is near a creek that deer like to walk along, but I’ve never caught a deer in our garden if I remember to put all the gates on.

Printing things at a 45 degree angle is a magic cheat code for tons of overhangs. It can also help give your prints more resolution as most designs tend to not care if the “tall” layers are diagonally oriented.

This is ASA. I’ve had some PLA+ parts that have been outside for 7-8 years and are holding up really well. The old garden gate hooks were PETG and were still in pretty good shape after 3 full seasons and had to flex pretty often.

Granted, I live in SE MI so our sun isn’t super duper intense.

And totally agree, once you get in the mode of “I can print something to make this better” you start finding more and more things to make.

Android is built in the Linux kernel. That’s actually some of what causes this - Android’s permissions model takes the Linux model and amplifies it. Apps are treated like users to prevent them from messing with each other’s files. If an app uses Android’s downloads manager it can write to the downloads directory, but it can only see the files that it put there.

I would send them an email. Depending on which kit you’re talking about they could probably figure something out or give you an ETA.

There are some Linux users with iPhones, perhaps that’s what they meant?