Kevin-the-lubber

Wonderful work once more, especially the winches. I also became afraid to glue things in place, because I’ve never managed to hold a complete picture, in my mind of the rigging sequence. Consequently I’ve always been worried that this or that would make rigging really difficult.

3D design and printing can certainly turn into a big rabbit hole, but I suspect you probably need to be inclined towards rabbit-holing anyway. I think the learning curve for resin is long and gentle, as you’ll get good prints right out of the box. Most of the learning is about making good prints great I.e designing for printing, object orientation, print supports, and using all those settings that are mostly ignored. Printers are marketed like sports cars, the emphasis is always on speed - but like many cars, printers perform better if you just slow down!

Really interesting thread, amazing how quickly Meshy has developed and I suspect it may allow me to duck the learning curve for Blender that I’ve been putting off since forever. The thread touches on many things relating to 3d and I hope my 2 cents worth around some of these are helpful; I have several resin printers, all of them Elegoo. No particular reason other than price, consistently good reviews and good personal experience. Like you, Chuck, I have three machines constantly on the go. I now use the Saturn 3 Ultra because I don’t like the complexity or cost of the tilting vat of the ultra 4, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about. For those thinking of buying a printer, it’s worth looking on eBay for good used models, as a toe in the water. The qualitative difference in prints from my Mars bought 5 years back and my Saturn 3 Ultra’s is so negligible as to be largely irrelevant, and you can pick up a good used printer for £50. Don’t touch anything that needs a new screen, nor anything that has resin all over it. I use wash and cure machines to do a three-wash routine, and would recommend them, but each to their own. I absolutely don’t and won’t run resin printers in my office; they are in my workshop, where I have fume extraction etc. I learned that the hard way a few years back, hospitalised with pneumonia. A tip for those in colder climates: a heated cabinet is invaluable. Resin doesn’t print well below about 22/23 degrees C. Slicers: I mostly use the original Chitubox free version, because it gives me wireless connection to the printers, which the newer version doesn’t. But I also use free or included-with-purchase versions of Voxeldance, Lychee and Elegoo’s own slicer Satelite, as and when I think that’s the better tool. Some of these have Boolean functionality. I don’t use that because I’m fairly adept with F360. If you are using Boolean in a slicer, you can use the dimensions function and ‘move’ tool to position the objects precisely in relation to each other. Does 3D printing turn it all into a ‘press the button and sit back’ thing? No. I’d bet my shirt that anyone reading this is not the type of person who buys a model kit and has it painted and assembled inside a month. We all like to bash, scratch, embellish, get creative. A 3D printer is just your own, personal, pseudo-injection-moulder. You’ve still got to make everything work as part of your build. The meshy outputs are a case in point. As impressive as they are, you could still spend hours and hours improving them, either on the software side or the printed output. Not so different to plastic kits. Besides which, I may be wrong but I don’t think it’s yet possible to generate an STL from meshy with the dimensional accuracy we mostly work to. So, it’s really, really good for organic shapes but perhaps less so for precision engineering.

That makes a lot of sense. I certainly get a much finer metallic look with pens and they are my default now. I also really like that I don’t have the setup and cleanup of airbrushing, not to mention the risk of clogging, and I get pretty good mileage from them too. By the way, I buy spare tips for mine. Very cheap and it means I can cut, crush, shape tips if I want.

Pentel, Zieler, whatever they have in your local art shop or stationers should do the job. They are relatively inexpensive.

Vallejo do various metallic acrylics for airbrushing and personally I haven’t found them at all difficult. They spray just like any acrylic. I’m a big fan of acrylic metallic artist pens. For small parts I much prefer using a gold pen than spraying. It lays a thicker coat which seems to make the finish look more metallic. I’ve also used a chrome pen on model car parts, to good effect. nb. Pretty much all my model parts are 3d printed but I don’t think that has any real bearing, the metallics work on many types of material.

Looking at how cleverly you've managed to make the frames for the pump, I think you'll do just as well with the winches. This is a very back-handed compliment but when I first saw the photos I thought 'I don't remember sending these to Ron'! Knowing how intricate these are even in resin, I'm seriously impressed that you've made them in metal. (I have made them in other scales on request, but these are so niche I haven't bothered listing on ebay). Anyway - unless you have a mill or someone to cut them for you, I think the gear wheels will have you scratching your head a bit, but I suspect you'll get there and get great job satisfaction when you do.

Very nicely done. You’ll enjoy the winches, they are even more interesting to make.

Yes, the Phecda package I chose came with air assist, a roller attachment, a honeycomb and an enclosure. I kind of mis-described the multi-pass flaring issue. It's more that the thicker the material the more likely that you'll have to tolerate a bit of flaring. This is down to beam focus i.e. if you try to cut 10mm ply using several passes, by the time it's cutting beyond, say, 5mm or 6mm deep, the beam is well out of focus and diffused, so you get a wider kerf. Obviously you can mitigate to some extent by adjusting the height. Your 20w head must be better than mine. I can cut 5mm in 3 passes at 8mm/second at 100% power. In fact, if I was buying again I'd do my homework and watch eBay. There are a lot of very good professional machines that come up for sale and I'm sure I could get something much better than any hobbyist machines, for much the same cost. But I guess to do that you need to have first learned what you can and can't do for £2000.

Good shout, but it also illustrates the issue for me: here, that would set me back around £2000; the Phecda cost about £400.

I have an Elegoo Phecda 20watt diode laser. I bought it on impulse via a kickstarter deal as I just wanted to get stuck in and get learning. I too use Lightburn as the cutting software; it’s brilliant and quite well priced. A few lessons; - decent fume extraction is simply essential. I use the machine in my garage workshop and had to put in a 150mm inline extractor fan and ductwork to vent outside, fixed to the laser enclosure - the machine takes up a lot of space! The footprint is 600mm square and about 300mm high. But you also need space either side for long material. - It was my plan to make veneer decks etc to sell. The cutting area is 400 square but this is not big enough. I realised almost immediately that I needed a 600mm long cutting area. - a 20 watt diode will give a fairly good finish on 5mm plywood in three passes but the more passes, the more the cut flares out. - on my diode module, the beam is oblong rather than round. This is a real nuisance because everything I make uses very precise dimensions with tolerances of 0.15mm being typical. I can achieve that with the laser, but with difficulty. - laser cutting is a very easy thing to learn, there are loads of good videos on YouTube. Overall, my advice would be to see if there is any way at all to first use a machine in a maker space / school / college, if only to quickly understand what you are getting into. Then, figure out what you want to use it for and buy a machine accordingly. If I was doing this all over again I’d be looking at an xtool machine as these have extension kits, but I’d also be thinking seriously about a co2 machine in order to be able to cut and engrave a wider range of materials. Don’t get me wrong, the Phecda is good at what it does and a 400mm work area is more than big enough for cutting bulkheads and frames, but there are some unexpected limitations. ps. Almost forgot: my main process is resin printing and I use highly flammable isopropyl alcohol for print washing. Having this running in the same space as lasering would be plain dangerous and part of the reason my laser machine sits unused for 99% of the time is because I have to shut down printing and make the space safe for lasering. I mention this just in case you also need to consider that.

Marc, just in case you haven't already picked up on this, a knee walker is a game changer. What always used to drive me mad following an ankle break or surgery was the difficulty in even moving around with a cup of coffee: during the recovery period. Knee walkers solve that. I was able to even walk up to the shop, go round our park etc. There are loads of brands these days, I bought a Stride-On off ebay and sold it on a few months later for what I paid. I feel your pain at work on the SR slowing down. Just yesterday, after months of not having any time at all for the ship, I spent some happy hours on the Victory. One can forget how good this hobby can be for the soul. So I hope you're able to grab the odd hour here and there, between now and April.

You are a genius Daniel. That is a very, very clever bit of lateral thinking.

Ian, in that case I’d guess that whoever uploaded the model had to simplify because of file size limits. Is there any way of tracing back to the designer and getting the original?

Does the .STL look that simplified before it’s sliced? It seems strange that someone has gone to all the trouble of modelling the interior in such detail but then simplified the hull like that. I think Bambu uses an in-house version of orca-slicer. I use the generic version and, when I drop in a complex object comparable to a boat, it throws a little hissy fit and then asks if I want the software to simplify. I wonder if this is happening automatically in yours, and if you can switch that off in preferences. A clue might be how long it takes to slice. I never simplify and it can take 10 minutes for it to grind its way through one of my arty vases or whatever, compared to 20 seconds for simple stuff.