(As a mod) Sorry, it must have happened right as I went to bed. So it was the worst timing for a maximum delay. I have removed the duplicates.

I’m not sure why it happened but it probably has something to do with LW being on a very old version of Lemmy and not updating.

Thanks. The main thing with paint is to be absolutely obsessive about the prep details and sanding. I’ve trained two apprentices. The hardest thing to defeat is one’s internal expectations of time. It is only right and ready when it is perfect even when redoing that primer for the fifth time feels like murder and the issue is only the size of a dime, it simply does not matter. That dime will cost two days to fix when it shows through, and that knowledge must come first. I told everyone that ever worked for me, “sand it until you think you are done, then take a break, come back, and acknowledge you are finally halfway done. Then repeat this until I cannot find a single issue with the panel.”

The cool thing about ABS and ASA is that you can sand it to a polish. Just treat it like a metal polish job but use automotive polishes instead of rouge like for metals. There are usually no inclusions from the print lines in my tests and it polishes to a remarkable finish that looks like extra shiny Lego’s. In fact, if you take a fully polished part and break it, you will likely find that the surface is changed for nearly a millimeter down. It happens even when the polish is done meticulously by hand with no buffer to heat up the surface. I’m not entirely sure what is happening with that one, but based on how it sounds and feels I bet there are better mechanical properties as well.

From my time around automotive racing, polished ABS/ASA feels like parts that are finished to reduce stress risers like how pistons and rods feel different after a similar polishing operation. I haven’t tested it, but that is how the parts felt to me. That might be one to try out, even with mechanical and functional prints. If you happen to snag some sandpapers, it only takes a sheet of 600 or 800, as a baseline where this has removed absolutely everything below regardless of what was below, then use 1500 to knock this down. Finally, toothpaste can nearly replace an automotive compound. No joke I have used it on cars in a pinch with a heavy cut pad. For a mirror it will take an intermediate cutting stage before the final polish. For something like a print that is already sitting at 1500 grit, toothpaste will get more shine than a typical new Lego. Just use an old sock and let the compound do the work just like with a buffer and pad.

The little Proxxon pen sander is also a must have device for print sanding in general. It is worth the spend. You only really need the sander without the power supply though. The supply is the scam. Just clip the wire and add a DC barrel jack to any old 12v 1A wall wart. Their sandpaper is really high quality and worth it, but some decent double sided tape will work to make your own. You can also make your own sandpaper holders to get into awkward places.

I don’t know that I could actually finish a Voron build now. That is the real underlying truth of it. I am physically declining and my up time is very limited over the last coupe of years. That has kinda quashed my EDA and circuit etching projects too, sadly. Even my riding is suffering. I did 26m every day for ~8 years after the broken neck and back, but now 16m every 2-3 days is all I can do and still sleep 4-6 hours at most. It is what it is… “Ya get what ya get and ya don’t pitch a fit.”

I’ve only gone through 2 rolls of the cheap Matterhackers house brand ABS and maybe a quarter roll of Prusa ASA. My primary curiosity was if ABS/ASA is an effective alternative to Prusament PC Blend. In my experiments, my primary use for ABS/ASA is for refinishing and polishing. I’m super familiar with ABS in pro auto body work I was doing before RepRap was even a thing. I actually specialized in plastics and small repairs in addition to airbrush and graphics work as a painter; liked the art, but work out of used car lots paid the bills.

I only made a little disk sander thing out of a box fan motor with a housing constrained by print bed dimensions, also some dremel drill press tooling, and some BB30 bicycle parts.

The disk sander thing was not very useful overall. The level of integrated design was extreme and impractical in most cases, but it proved to me that I could technically do it. That largely helped me avoid the desire to build a Voron. Plus I spent years huffing ABS fumes already. The bicycle stuff showed me that PC blend is still quite a bit better at holding a load in the real world. I designed a couple of parts with threads that hold the bearings in tension on the spindle of the bike crank. I’m certainly not in race shape any more, but I am still quite hard on bike stuff. Plus bikes are a great test bed as leg forces are unbalanced, the vibration is inconsistent, contaminants are random, and UV exposure is harsh.

Anyways, the prusament ASA doesn’t have as many issues as MH ABS, but the difference is not huge. If I was going to do automotive class finishing, that is the only time I would go out of my way to use ABS/ASA. I could make it perfect on another level entirely than anything else I have played with.

Makes a huge difference with my junky TPU if it is dry or not.

I also have a massive stacked Lack (sp?) table with double legs. I put that stack with a MK3S+ into a 55 gallon trash bag and can print the entire build volume. The thing is, it has to be totally sealed off well and no traffic in the room that might disturb the thing in the slightest. I won’t even open a door to the room. I also let the bed heat for longer before the print starts. Lastly, I must design for ABS specifically and am very conscious of layer thickness transitions. I look at all filaments and designs as an optimization exercise for materials and process kinda thing. I design everything I print. So my advice is an abstraction of what is possible under similar constraints. Most files people share are not very well designed for 3d printing, or for material specific requirements/optimizations. I don’t recommend printing other people’s stuff unless you are forced to for some reason.

The primary issue with ABS is how heat is soaked into top layer/bottom layer transitions near any side walls. In most cases, just make a tapered transition over a long area and remove any top layers in places like interior surfaces. Designing tops sections that are rounded or hollow is another key, along with no supports based designs. Using exposed 3d cubic infill is how I get around a lot of the top layer heat issues.

If anyone is actually wanting to print ABS a lot, obviously just get a Voron.

ABS needs an enclosure for anything above around 10 layers. Even a room closed with it warm and no one inside is not enough to save an ABS print. Just the air from the moving tool head and the bed are enough to disturb a print and cause layer separation. An IKEA Lack table and a garbage bag over it is enough of an enclosure to count and get most prints alright. It stinks though.

TPU will have holes and look terrible unless you print out of a filament drier. You can dry the stuff a lot and print for around 45 minutes with it in open air before it will absorb enough moisture to start expanding steam in the melt zone and blowing holes in your print layers.

Zero. There are no secrets on silicon. Everything can be reverse engineered based on observation and lapping the die.

Yes and no. It would have a long way to go for similar x86 single thread speeds. However, the future will belong to whatever single processor can handle all workloads. The dual processor workloads for GPU and CPU is a temporary hack. Around 8 years from now a new architecture will emerge as dominant. That is the 10 years it takes from idea to real hardware product in silicon. The problem has been obvious for 2 years already. The next architecture must be done from scratch on a level very similar to the gap between RISC-V and x86 right now. So ultimately, it is a no because that redesign renders the lead of the present useless. Present processors are power constrained for the L2 to L1 cache bus width. If all of those bits on the bus are high, it pulls the whole core down. This is where things are optimised for high speed single thread operations like traditional code. Large math tensors need a wide bus to load and offload quickly so it is entirely incompatible. Regardless of the merits of everyone running AI or not, in the data center business where there are very little profit margins, anyone that can make a single processor that can scale to handle both workloads well enough will win out in the long run. This dual processor paradigm has already been tried and failed. When x86 was in the x286 to x386 era a second floating point math unit was required for any advanced workloads like CAD. That created a dual processor architecture that resulted in a flop. Everyone in hardware is aware of this history. Why would anyone support a new grassroots proprietary hardware design for this new generation of hardware that requires a fortune in royalties if a similar processor is negligibly different at the same phase of development and is a free and open instruction set architecture with no royalties. Plus this means that the IC designer is no longer locked into an ecosystem of vendor peripherals. Anyone can design and sell little circuit blocks and on chip peripherals, even proprietary ones, for use on any chip. This is basically true open market capitalism for an ISA. It is a standardized framework for anyone to build on instead of the notoriously authoritarian, oppressive, and anticompetitive Intel. The outcome of that set of constraints seems obvious to me.

If China ever goes hardcore on open source across the board for all hardware and software, it would absolutely crush the present Western hegemony. It would be the most moral high ground move too.