I remember when that car first showed up. There’s a few problems with it.

First, it’s not something you can print at home- it was printed on a commercial FDM machine large enough to print its entire chassis, and the nozzle is freaking huge.

The next biggest issue with it is that it’s a glorified golf cart. It has no safety rating and likely wouldn’t be allowed to get registered in many places without it.

It’s also quite low to the ground and dangerous to try and drive on roads because it’s hard to see.

Is it cool? Absolutely. But it’s not a car in the same sense many would see a car.

that was something I never quite understood in star trek.

Like. with Voyager building the Delta Flyer.

What kind of incompetent, useless, dumbass engineers would have technology like replicators*, but then design spaceships that don’t use that to build their own spare parts… or entire shuttles, etc. While we’re at it… why design an exploration starship, whose primary power system wasn’t built around fuels that could be easily replicated (and use transporters to suck in, iunno, astreroids, and then use that energy to produce said easily replicated fuel.)

*Replicators really should be called fabricators. replicators replicate themselves, like in SG:1. fabricators … fabricate other things…

You…wouldn’t download a car, would you?

(Yes. yes I would.)

Imagine, if you will, hot glue sticks, only in chocolate.

You won’t need to have the entire printer be stainless, just the hot end/heatblock and heat break.

Then a feed system that drop more sticks in as the next gos down.

The stick can be driven by a food safe silicone rubber wheel. Maybe some sort of squashy tread so you get better contact/traction.

Wouldn’t be able to have super-high retraction, since it’s not a continuous length… but details.

Chocolate sticks can be printed easily, though.

12-25mm diameter filament.

Use an all metal hot end (stainless steel, preferably,). And slow its feed rate down with a gear reduction.

You wouldn’t even need them to be round if you milled out your own heat block. Just of a consistent cross section.

You know that’s generally not helpful, right?

Like, okay. Enders are not the best printers. It’s what they have. Most of us can’t just go out and get a printer just because it doesn’t meet your standards.

People should have realistic expectations, but Enders aren’t incapable of okay-prints, and with a lot of love, some awesome prints.

This is especially not helpful since it’s probably the filament needing to be dried and temp adjustments for the plastic.

Gotta be careful with ovens.

First they have a huge gradient and it may not be 60c in there even if the oven says it is. If you must use an oven, the best is to set it to bread “proof”- this setting is used to let dough rise and usually isn’t all that hot. (Though…. It could be. It’s inconsistent sometime,)

Remember, glass transition is usually about half the melting temp, and you want to be about 2/3s that at the highest. If you go past it, you might get sintering- the filament sticks to itself.

Personally, a cheap food dehydrator is going to do the trick. Alternatively, a tub with moisture absorbing beads bulked up in the bottom and few days or a week or two should do the trick gently. (You can buy big ass jugs of the beads at big box hardware stores or Amazon. Hell you can get 55 gallon drums of them if you really wanted to…)

So there’s zero need to directly connect the pc to the printer. Usually there’s either a microsd or similar to plug in and load to print from that.

However, if you want to, Pronterface is a useful tool for providing command inputs via usb.

It gives you a basic gui to set temperature, manually move the print bead, some telemetry (real time temp charts,) and if you really felt like it… you can print small files across the usb (or push them to the sd and tell it to print from there. Though file transfer rate is usually dog-breath slow.)

Most usefully, it has a command line interface that allows you to send manual gcodes. This is very helpful for tuning and maintenance. (For example m851 will report XYZ offset, and you can set it with for example m851 z-2.47)

Or if you use UBL, create and store the g29 meshes (and if you add t to the command it’ll report values. For example g29 l0 t will load the mesh in slot 0, and report in the box.)

There’s a ton of useful g and m codes.

Mostly by the cost? As for sets, they’re going to be 200+ easy.

Theres also some difference in tolerances, but to be honest, a super tight tolerance is a double edged sword. Bulk-produced bolts won’t be as tight anyhow.

For casual/infrequent uses, it’s totally fine to get the inexpensive ones. (I’d recommend going to a local hardware store, they tend to have not totally-removedty sets and most sizes/threads individually.)

Also, for printed parts, you can absolutely just cut in with the bolt, unless your printer is somewhat inconsistent, a with a well-calibrated printer, all you really need to know is how much your holes tend to shrink (the thermal contraction as the plastic causes the final diameter to be smaller. This is why we invented test prints…… well. Not me. Somebody’s smarter than me.)

So the stuff about the 1/8” rod is… just a general fabrication tip.

If you’re ever reading a bill of materials and they call for threaded rod- which is unfortunately common for a lot of printer groups- you can almost always use the same size smooth rod if you cut thread on the ends with a die.

It saves money (threaded rod is smooth rod with threads cut the full length,) and it looks neater. (A drill and some sand paper and a bit of scrapped t-shirt cloth doped with green buffing compound will make it shiny, even.)

What the other person is saying about tap magic, is just to use lubricants while cutting. 3-in-1’s og is my go to. Tap magic is a similar brand. You can get by with wd-40 if you have to.

all it’s doing is helping with temperature, and making cleaner cuts since it lubes every thing (the cutting edge still bites, but it doesn’t bind as much with the chips.)

The other thing to remember is that every turn or half turn, you should break off the chips (the metal coming off,) by backing off a quarter turn. This helps keep the cutting head free making a neater thread.

Other than that there’s no reason to be intimidated by any of this. For this, you can probably just cut the m5 thread, but you’ll want to predrill what ever bolt’s standard bore size is, and be sure to keep that square and straight as you do.

The uxcell is a “cheap” brand, for a one-time thing it’s fine but if you find you use it more and it’s getting frustrating to use… it’s lost its edge and is dull.

So, the biggest difference in quality is the steel and hardness.

For 2020 aluminum, it’s not that big of a deal. Even less so for “occasional” use. For harder metals, the cheapos will wear out faster and that maybe leads to frustration.

Guess my point was… we almost never use more than 2-3 in a set, so, it’s better to get the 2-3 and better quality at the same - but totally get the cheapie if you don’t want to spend that much.

At least I only use m3,5 and 1/8” sets.

Also, for the record, you can absolutely tap plastic for a reasonably strong thread. Just add a couple extra perimeters.

So the thread in the aluminum was stripped?

There’s a few options that might work. Threadlocker isn’t really epoxy or glue. I’d the thread is merely loose, it’ll keep it from coming out with vibration.

Another option is straight up epoxy- but this would be hard to undo.

Possibly, the best option would be to re-tap the thread. You might be able to get an m4 tap and clean it up with that.

If that doesn’t work, or it’s already that far gone, you could probably go up to an m5, though that would weaken the extrusion more than intended.

If you do want to try re-tapping, avoid the trap of buying tap and die sets. Just get the individual pieces you need (the chuck/holder thing and a the m4 or m5 tap.) a cheap set will still be more expensive than high-quality taps in the 2-3 sizes you actually wind up using.

(Also, general note 1/8” smooth rod is in every hardware store, and a die is much cheaper than 1/8” thread and usually looks neater, unless you need it fully threaded.)

Careful. Too high and you will get failed prints. (Somewhere around the glass transition temp,)

I’d suggest taking it down to 210, 215. a bed at 60 should be normal. If you have one take an IR thermometer and read off a sheet of paper (or a 1-layer print. the thermometers aren’t so good at reading glossy surfaces.) IIRC, for most PLA’s the glass transition temperature is around 70 so 60 should be right there.

Glass transition is where the plastic begins to soften and be bendable/moldable.

How’s your temperature? Could be printing too hot. Both on the nozzle and the bed.

you’re layer adhesion is fine?

Do you see the pattern in the textured bed? what happens if you get some modeling clay or playdough or a kneading eraser, or anything like it and press it to the plate?

If it’s not just a texture coming off the build plate (guessing not on your comments?) and it’s not from your z offset/first layer height, then I would look at your temperature settings (might be too hot?) and check that your expected extrusion widths are matching what you are in fact getting.

can you print PLA on the .8 nozzle just fine? (I’d suggest clearing the clog- an atomic pull is my go to, maybe followed up with some cleaner filament, then a filament you know well.)

for some comparison, a .8mm nozzle has about four times the crosssection of a .4mm nozzle. (.502 to .125 mm^2), similarly, the volume of a 1mm line printed, assuming you’re using a line width equal to the nozzle and a half your nozzle diameter in layer height, is about 4 times as much, as well. ( .32 mm^3 compared to .08 mm^3.)

in short, given the same printing speed, and the same diameter filament, you’re going to have to extrude 4 times as much filament at any given moment, which means the filament will have to pushed through much faster than a .4mm nozzle, which in turn means that the plastic has about a quarter of the time to heat up before being pushed out of the nozzle tip- and there’s more of it to absorb the heat.

There’s a few things you can try, but probably the only one that would be effective without more or less rebuilding the hotend (and the new-parts-cost associated with that,) is slowing it down.

For the record, if it wasn’t clogged before, it probably is now. since, ultimately, what would be happening is that the .8mm nozzle is causing your printer to print cold.

Looks to me like the plastic isn’t getting hot enough fast enough.

Is it just wood filament that isn’t printing right? Can you print pla or whatever on the .8mm?

Does the filament brand suggest a range that’s higher than you normally print at?

Have you used blender at all? It has some photogrammetry .

I’m not sure it’ll be even close to precise, but, it’s a start.

So like that hot-glue-models that came out? you could tell it was supposed to be a cube-like object. For a middleschool hacking components out of junk electronics… well… it was both hilariously awful… but in hindsight I should have been very proud of it.

it did do what I needed at the time, though, so there was that. I wouldn’t really recommend PVA as a filament material, though.