Drafts Zero – The Lost Blog Posts

I watched Primer the other night [12/30/2010]

[In complete draft post… for some incomplete thoughts. The movie Primer was a real trip. Even so, it’s not nearly as wild as Timecrimes. If you haven’t seen it, don’t read anything, just watch it.]

Often I’m able to figure out what’s going on in a film before the end.

I think I’ll be sticking to Doctor Who for my time travel sci-fi needs.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

You can keep your filthy money [12/28/2010]

[Dang. I sure was salty that day.]

I have a totally different website that operates as a webservice to a very¹ niche market of generally non-technically savvy people. Non-technically savvy as in IE6 is prevalent. Nay, rampant. Please, please, please don’t run IE6 and expect anything on the interwebs to work. I’d rather lose income than build a site that works with IE6.

Moral of the story: Get a real browser or I don’t want your filthy money.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Very very very [↩]

Potential improvements for Leonardo Voltron [12/27/20210]

[A very incomplete blog post about a variation on a snap-together action figure, which I’d modified to turn into a Voltron. Because I always wanted a Voltron as a kid. :)]

When I was working on this Voltron derivative of the Leonardo Robot, I was trying to make it more detailed overall. That version

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Mendel to the power of 101 [12/21/2010]

[Nophead has been clearly deeply dedicated to producing RepRap parts. It’s pretty incredible he could run his printers around the clock for 9 months to produce more than 100 RepRap part sets. This comes out to about 3 days for each set. The RepRap website has a wealth of information on all the different kinds of RepRaps that can be built – but it doesn’t look like there’s any longer one “official” recommended build. The strength of the movement – diverse ideas, highly configurable and customizable designs, can make it very daunt for someone just getting started. I’m honestly not sure where I would get started if I wanted to scratch-build a RepRap these days. After noodling around with a few of the models, I’m guessing it might be possible to build a set of modern RepRap parts in as little as 12 hours.]

Nophead of the HydraRaptor blog is probably the most prolific producer of plastic RepRap parts. He recently posted that he’s run his 3D printers¹ just about constantly for the last year, printing 101 sets of Mendel parts.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

A Mendel and his own HydraRaptor [↩]

Ultimachine PLA review [12/15/2010]

[Just an unpublished review for Ultimachine PLA purchased 16 years ago. I don’t think any review I might have written back then would be fair today, not least of which because I simply didn’t have a good handle on printing with PLA very well back then.]

My Ulimachine PLA arrived while I was at Botacon. I had ordered black PLA and silver PLA. The black was a shiny black plastic and the silver was a dark gun-metal color – about the same shininess and darkness as a piece of duct tape. Admittedly, I was expecting a lighter, shinier, plastic – more like a true polished silver, rather than a metallic color. Mind, I’m not at all disappointed. I’m very much looking forward to using it.

Tonight (well, technically last night as it is now very early morning) I tried printing with some Ultimachine black PLA. I tried out my stock MakerBot settings. My settings are only those that come with ReplicatorG, except that I extrude PLA at 200C and ABS at 230. I keep each in its own profile and have edited the “start.txt” files so that they are at the proper temperature.

In any case, I tried printing out with the black PLA at using the exact settings I’ve been printing using to print clear MakerBot PLA. The parts came out beautifully with no warp and I noticed very little oozing. When my clear PLA is heated up to 200C or so, it can tend to ooze right out of the extruder. Perhaps its the formula of PLA or the pigments, but the blank PLA didn’t seem to do that nearly as much.

For the first few objected printed from the black Ultimachine PLA, I would call it a success. I would also note that they included some green and white plastic as well. I suspect they’re both PLA, but I don’t know for sure as they’re not labeled and there’s no accompanying note. I would have to actually try them out in the extruder and see how they behave when melted before I would venture a guess as to which plastic they are with any degree of confidence.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Dilbert comic [12/13/2010]

[Full disclosure: I’ve come to deeply dislike Scott Adams for his political views in the years since this comic strip. What’s particularly strange about this comic strip is that while I must have found something about it interesting at the time … now it doesn’t speak to me at all. Maybe it’s that there doesn’t actually appear to be an joke in this comic at all? Maybe it’s the awkward Dilbert approaching a coworker, at work, to ask her out in a strange way. Anyway, in keeping with the spirit of this series, here’s the post.]

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Princess Bride with Lightsabers [12/13/2010]

[The entire draft was nothing more than this link to a “Star Wars meets The Princess Bride – The Chatty Duelists video” by VFXFreak. This was nearly 16 years ago, long before AI slop videos, which means someone spent their own time and effort to create this.]

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

The Patents for disc shooters [12/10/2010]

[There’s no secret I’ve always loved the old “disc shooters” that could be picked up in a grocery store aisle. These were called the “Rayline Tracer Gun“, sold from the 1960’s to 1980’s, and then kind of disappeared. Much more recently, someone started selling replicas on Amazon. Once I had a 3D printer, this was one of my ideal prints. It was easy to blow through a pile of the discs and lose them all in an afternoon. But, the little discs look very printable.

A year after the below post, I’d go on to post about a contest for a design of a disc shooter. I started building some of the components for the disc shooter and the disc cartridge, but never end up building a reasonably functional shooter.

This is a project I’d still like to come back to and resurrect. ¹ I’m confident with enough trial and error, I could design something that would work in a similar fashion. Anyhow, below are links to the patents for these toys which I’d found as part of my research into building one for myself.]

PDF of Patent # 3515114: DISC PROJECTING TOY PISTOL, Filed 9/22/1967, Issued 6/2/1970
Link to Patent # 3515114 on Google Patent Search
PDF of Patent # 5613482: Disk shooting toy gun, Filed 1/27/1995, Issued 3/25/1997
Link to Patent # 5613482 on Google Patent Search

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Get in line! [↩]

Skein them all and let ‘Bot sort them all out [11/24/2010]

[Just a bit of silliness that was left at the bottom of my drafts bin :) This was in response to a blog post on Thingiverse asking about user’s printing anxiety.]

I think I’m finding these questions to be funnier than perhaps they were intended to be.

“Broad Flat Bottoms”? Sign me up!

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Printed Pink Panther Person [11/22/2010]

[This is a funny bit of MakerBot / Thingiverse / 3D printing lore. One of the earliest uploads to Thingiverse, #1216 uploaded on 11/01/2009, was the mysterious “Pink Panther Woman!!!” by “januario.” Whoever januario was, they uploaded this model, provided zero context, and never, ever came back. The original model was listed with a “no derivatives” license, but people still created lots of variations. This was in my PLA printing days and on a MakerBot Cupcake CNC at that, so the print quality is not up to what you’d expect today. The layer lines were around 0.28 – 0.3mm and the PLA was … a little goopy. Even so, it was a fantastic looking model.]

"The Pink Panther Lady" — “The Pink Panther Lady”

This print turned out really well. In preparation I made sure I had enough vertical clearance by raising the Z platform up 11.5cm (100 mm for the print, 15 mm extra for the Z platform raise at the end of the print). I was a little nervous about the print since I had been having tangles in my filament spindle all day long. Fortunately, that didn’t prove to be a problem. I printed in PLA at 200 degrees, 1% plastic infill, with an extra shell all the way around. Since nearly every cross section was fairly large, printing in PLA went very well. In any case, I wanted to print this to see if I could. I can, indeed, print it – and quite well at that.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts