Hey all.
Shannon here. I'm 50. Just retired in December from Corrections after 27 years of that mess.
Not security. Clerical work actually. Which really paid to much to pass up. Mostly mindless repetitive work that left me lots of brain power to think about all of the things I'm passionate about and easy enough that it left me with lots of time to research all of those passions. And most of my weekends and days off were dedicated to those things. Mostly involving high voltage Tesla coils, professional photography and photo editing, studying local geology to make me a better prospector, and rock hounding, electric bikes and motorcycles, Honda Odysses (the Honda gokart from the 80s), government conspiracies and cover ups, various electronic and lithium battery building endeavors. All the things...
So for the mindless work which left me with time and energy to put into many other things, and the early retirement...I am thankful.
But anyway, I just wanted to share a new joy that I've found that is 3D printing. This is a magical kind of 2 dimensional printing of 3 dimensional objects using the equivalent of a robotically controlled glue gun. It just draws lines on a 2 dimensional space, following lines of code that are created by a software program called a "slicer". In the slicer you insert a 3d model (of whatever you've drawn in cad or more often have downloaded off the internet) and you tell the slicer what parameters you want to use to print that item (line heights and widths, thickness of the walls, size of the nozzle your using and the type of filament that you will use to print it, and many other specialized but not normally necessary options that you can modify) Then you slice the model, which is basically scanning what every 2 dimensional slice of that model looks like, which we call a layer, and translating that into G code, which is the language that the printer speaks. The G code gives specific instructions to the printer on which dots should be filled within the 3 dimensional matrix that surrounds the model. That matrix is one of pixels, if you will, that are mapped in such a way that each point in the matrix corresponds to a coordinate within the 3 dimensional space in which the printer is able to create matter within. And the printer recreates the model by creating slices of it, one layer at a time, by drawing tiny lines made of plastic. Which to be specific, is polylactic acid. A by product of... you'll never guess..... corn. Yep. You print with a corn-plastic glue-gun controlled by a robot. It's amazing.
And because it's additive manufacturing you can create all sorts of things that have never been possible before because you can create positive things within negative spaces that just aren't available with subtractive manufacturing. In subtractive your always taking material away from something that already exists. And because you have to take off an outside layer to get to an inside layer, you just can't ever approach the capability that lies within making something from the inside to the out. It kind of feels like playing God. Or at least having access to the tools that he would have had to of had to create things in that manner. Primitive versions of it. But still impressively cool and mind blowing.
I'm currently taking a sabbatical from printing super complex models that require days to print and require a lot of assembly... to make cool windmills and pretty birdhouses.
But the point of all of this is.... finally.... that if you are retired early, and you're bored like me, because the weather is shit, and you like technical stuff that you can dive right into and get totally immersed in, then this might be just the thing for you.
The Bambu A1 is the perfect machine. It's about $350 for single color printing, which is really all you need for most things. Add another $200 if you need to print multicolored pokemon or something weird... you'll need the system that includes the AMS, which is a multi filament automatic swapping mechanism. It prints right out of the box for the most part. If you want to make very technical things then you have to put a little love into figuring out the slicing parameters. But most objects are easy to just load into the slicer, put the sliced file onto an sd card, plug the sd into the printer, and watch the magic happen. It's really quite fascinating to watch.
Here's some examples of my prints.
Thanks for listening.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/klasdja/54515218907/in/dateposted/
Shannon here. I'm 50. Just retired in December from Corrections after 27 years of that mess.
Not security. Clerical work actually. Which really paid to much to pass up. Mostly mindless repetitive work that left me lots of brain power to think about all of the things I'm passionate about and easy enough that it left me with lots of time to research all of those passions. And most of my weekends and days off were dedicated to those things. Mostly involving high voltage Tesla coils, professional photography and photo editing, studying local geology to make me a better prospector, and rock hounding, electric bikes and motorcycles, Honda Odysses (the Honda gokart from the 80s), government conspiracies and cover ups, various electronic and lithium battery building endeavors. All the things...
So for the mindless work which left me with time and energy to put into many other things, and the early retirement...I am thankful.
But anyway, I just wanted to share a new joy that I've found that is 3D printing. This is a magical kind of 2 dimensional printing of 3 dimensional objects using the equivalent of a robotically controlled glue gun. It just draws lines on a 2 dimensional space, following lines of code that are created by a software program called a "slicer". In the slicer you insert a 3d model (of whatever you've drawn in cad or more often have downloaded off the internet) and you tell the slicer what parameters you want to use to print that item (line heights and widths, thickness of the walls, size of the nozzle your using and the type of filament that you will use to print it, and many other specialized but not normally necessary options that you can modify) Then you slice the model, which is basically scanning what every 2 dimensional slice of that model looks like, which we call a layer, and translating that into G code, which is the language that the printer speaks. The G code gives specific instructions to the printer on which dots should be filled within the 3 dimensional matrix that surrounds the model. That matrix is one of pixels, if you will, that are mapped in such a way that each point in the matrix corresponds to a coordinate within the 3 dimensional space in which the printer is able to create matter within. And the printer recreates the model by creating slices of it, one layer at a time, by drawing tiny lines made of plastic. Which to be specific, is polylactic acid. A by product of... you'll never guess..... corn. Yep. You print with a corn-plastic glue-gun controlled by a robot. It's amazing.
And because it's additive manufacturing you can create all sorts of things that have never been possible before because you can create positive things within negative spaces that just aren't available with subtractive manufacturing. In subtractive your always taking material away from something that already exists. And because you have to take off an outside layer to get to an inside layer, you just can't ever approach the capability that lies within making something from the inside to the out. It kind of feels like playing God. Or at least having access to the tools that he would have had to of had to create things in that manner. Primitive versions of it. But still impressively cool and mind blowing.
I'm currently taking a sabbatical from printing super complex models that require days to print and require a lot of assembly... to make cool windmills and pretty birdhouses.
But the point of all of this is.... finally.... that if you are retired early, and you're bored like me, because the weather is shit, and you like technical stuff that you can dive right into and get totally immersed in, then this might be just the thing for you.
The Bambu A1 is the perfect machine. It's about $350 for single color printing, which is really all you need for most things. Add another $200 if you need to print multicolored pokemon or something weird... you'll need the system that includes the AMS, which is a multi filament automatic swapping mechanism. It prints right out of the box for the most part. If you want to make very technical things then you have to put a little love into figuring out the slicing parameters. But most objects are easy to just load into the slicer, put the sliced file onto an sd card, plug the sd into the printer, and watch the magic happen. It's really quite fascinating to watch.
Here's some examples of my prints.
Thanks for listening.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/klasdja/54515218907/in/dateposted/
