It’s pretty quiet in there…

I swear your post wasn't on my screen when I posted the same link.

My friend printed this modified Williams switch cover. It came out nice. It’s a little taller. More room for the wires. Thanks @mpwalker for the modified file.

1394D83F-6491-4E18-AC35-DD5894B2B892 (resized).jpeg

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4718348/files

Pretty sure a more pinsiders have 3d printers than lasers and that is a newer thread. I would like to have a laser, but have not be able to justify it, yet.

looks like I beat you by 24 seconds, so yeah, you were typing yours while I was posting mine.

I've probably said this before, but I'm going to repeat it anyway:

Please, please, don't buy or operate lasers that don't come with full enclosures, complete with exhaust that you are properly venting.

Machines like the X1 are garbage. They are not remotely safe, or a good idea. That they keep getting more powerful strikes me as criminal.

Spring the extra cash for a proper tool if you want to get into lasers, it's not worth it to cheap out for one of these open frame nonsense boxes. And I think a lot of people in this thread who like making signs and big flat things would have a blast with a laser. Just invest in your health and safety and get something legit.

Plastics possibly but wood and glass never killed anyone? I haven't heard of anything health cropping up? I would vent for the smell, not for anything else. Of course in california everything seems to need a warning label for some reason?

And everyone in Kentucky is married to their cousin, right? Let's not make this about stupid state stereotypes, this is about taking care of each other.

When you start playing with serious tools you need to take them seriously and respect them. FDM printing is fairly fool proof, so long as your printer doesn't have thermal runaway issues. When you graduate past that there are things you need to be educated about.

If you're resin printing you need to be careful handling uncured resin with your bare skin, you need to wear a respirator if you're sanding. If you're cutting with a laser you need to know what's safe to cut and how to be around it safely.

You are burning through things, even if they're nominally safe for lasers (wood, acrylic, natural leather) you don't want the be breathing in the smoke and fumes, nor coating the ceiling of your house/garage/basement with them. (Also, they can smell terrible.)

A beam that can cut through ⅛" wood will fuck your eye up if it's reflected off something and hits it. And even if you're diligent about wearing the stupid glasses they include, they're often garbage colored plastic that don't actually stop the wavelength. Buy name brand glasses from a reliable source if you want to go that route.

Laser cutting is rad, it's an awesome creative tool, and I think a lot of people in this thread would get a real kick out of it. But I encourage you to do your homework, and don't cheap out overmuch. If you're really on a budget consider a K40. Smaller cutting area, but it's a properly enclosed C02.

Anyways, if you don't want to read my ramblings watch this:

I started playing around with multicolor printing on my single nozzle Ender 3. Instead of pausing the printer or adding a change filament code to swap filaments, I sliced each color separately and made sure the Z hop would clear the already printed colors. That way, the colors are smooth and flat. It came out pretty good and I learned a couple things along the way. Next time I’ll break the blue section into to slices. The first few layers with z hop, and the remainder without. This should help with stringing. I’ll try to clean it up a bit more tomorrow

C658E3A2-96E9-4827-B376-6D9DF6F191FE (resized).jpeg

Dupe

No doubt. Only reason I have one is I caught a smoking deal on craigslist; someone bought it for architecture school, but given the pandemic they just did everything as 3D models online. She just wanted it gone. One of the best deals of my life

Geez, nobody was stereo typing california, its on every warning sticker in your house,appliances etc, and its just california. Look for yourself. Thats a fact, not a steretype, but thanks for stereotyping my state though. Nice.
I don't think anyone is laser etching inside there bedroom, common sense in the directions a workshop or garage is fine. No need to sound an alarm and tell everyone not to buy a laser etcher? Its no more dangerous than smoking ribs, or sitting around a camp fire, unless you are doing those things inside your house?

Can you explain the process of slicing each color separately in a little more detail? Is each color a different STL and you arrange them in the slicer and tell it to print each one in order? I'm not quite sure how this works but I'm interested because the result looks good.

most people 3d print in their house. not a far stretch to also think lasercutting in your house is ok. Even if you do lasercut in a garage, its not uncommon to watch it cut for a minute to make sure its cutting properly. you can breathe a lot of fumes in that short time. and even wood has chemicala in it, technically you should be wearing a mask even while using a circular saw.

If you are running a laser you really should be watching it the entire time. Never leave it unattended, this is not like 3D printing where you set it up and then walk away.

This is someone I know, he was cutting acrylic, left the machine going in his garage while he went inside and then came back out to this:

Laser fire (resized).png

As he said at the time "Thankfully, I was able to extinguish it without damage to property, or person- only pride and wallet." Machine was trashed, lost a couple grand of hardware. It's a common story, you have to treat these machines with respect. I've had very small fires start, but I was always on top of them and they never were a real danger. But it's enough to remind you that attending your machine is Laser 101 for a reason.

Anyways, we started a new thread for this, and it never took off, but I really do think that the people making all these great signs would enjoy the heck out of a laser once they learned to use it. Yeah, you gotta attend it, but I could cut the white outlines for that Funko sign in probably under a minute out of ⅛" acrylic, very easy. Stack a few colors, use acrylic welding cement, and it would be super clean and shiny.

Sure,

I designed the sign initially into 3 colored groups; white, yellow, and blue.

You have to change your Cura settings to disable “ensure models are apart” and “automatically drop models to build plate”.

I exported all of the bodies (1blue, 4 white, and 5 yellow) using the export mesh command in fusion 360. Next, I brought them all I to Cura. Next I merged all the models (control A, then right click over the group). Next align the group using the first layer of the group to the build plate. Next you have to right click to ungroup the 10 STL files. They will stay in the stacked position.

Next adjust all of your cut settings and enable z hop at 0.5mm (my first layers were at 0.4mm tall). Also turn off a skirt and the support selection.

Then, delete all the blue and yellow items from Cura and slice the white stls together. Then undo to get all 10 STL files back into Cura. Next delete all the models but the yellow and slice that file. Then undo to get all 10 models back. Lastly, delete all but the blue models and slice again.

Now you should have 3 Goode files. First, print the white. When the printer is done, manually adjust the bed to bring it back up to temp (60c in my case). Then change the nozzle to 95 degrees and do a cold filament pull. Bring the nozzle back up to 200 degrees and feed in the next color and purge the filament using the Extrude motion until the white is purged. Then, print the second file. Repeat the same step for the blue when the yellow is done.

I learned a couple things from this experiment.
1) print the files that have Zhop concentric to keep the Z hop at a minimum
2) cut the final color 0.4 (+0.8 from the build plate) above the yellow and white layers. This will enable you to slice the second blue STL without Z hop which makes for less stringing and is easier on the hardware.

I hope that helps

Me too!
Need to learn what the z hop is as well… lol

Heck, you're supposed to attend to your freakin' toaster!

Hello all. I'm looking to print a protector that goes over sparky's feet in metallica. The factory plastic is broken in a few places. I'd possibly redo the factory piece and just make it thicker, but I didn't know if there was something else out there.

Haha no worries. I’ve been doing a lot of studying since I’m a noob. Zhop is a setting that tells the print head and nozzle to lift in +Z when it’s not printing. That way it does not hit the already printed portion of the print. In my case, the white and yellow were printed at 0.4mm thick so I programmed in a 0.5 Zhop so it would clear the white and yellow when printing

Sorry, but why would you not just inject a filament change command where you wanted the color swaps?

It does seem easier to design it this way from the ground up. There are limitations though and it depends on the complexity of the design. If you do the filament change this way you need to design it so that each color ends on its own layer height. So in the one he made, the green from the crown would have to be higher than the blue from the letters so the printer can print the entire blue part, then the green, then finish off with white. You'd also risk having the green bleed through the white on the rest of the print.
For that specific design it probably wouldn't be an issue, but if you have a design where a color needs to be different on the same layer it causes issues.

It's a little small but if you look at the rockband guitar holder I made in this picture you can see a white strip because the base color is black and the part that holds the neck of the guitar is black and the white of the logo is in between them. Unless you get really fancy with the g-code and do inter-layer filament swaps you can't avoid this kind of thing.

If I had designed it like xdetroit does it would have printed the entire holder in black first and then gone back and printed the white guitar logo on top and the white band on the neck would not have to be there.

pasted_image (resized).png

(better pic of the print if you want to zoom in to see what I mean https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4638527)

Pause in the gcode is fine if you want to stack colors. I wanted all 3 colors to be flush. Plus, this way the face is down so they are smooth from the build plate.

You guys are killing me here. Math? Z hop. I quit
Lol
Now seriously really cool stuff.
I want to learn more just didnt have the time, gotta dive deep into fusion but I am procrastinating until I finish a mod I am working on. I dont want to add project to the project pile, my adhd takes over and nothing gets done.

Almost done! Then I will unlock that space in my brain for more knowledge, now that I know what zhop is… lol good start

Haha i get it. I’ve been printing for less than a month but I have CAD skills from my job. Also, i must have listened to like 100 YouTube videos about this stuff. So much to learn.

For those with a GZ Premium, I've posted this on the GZ owners thread. I uploaded the models to Thingiverse but they are not live yet. Should be tomorrow. Hope you can enjoy. They are 3d replacements for the mechagodzilla plastics.

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/stern-godzilla-official-owners-club/page/373#post-7380960

Time for LED's

PXL_20230130_233728571 (resized).jpg

Well the K40 while on paper seems great does require a ton of tweaks and change. Yes it has an enclosure and a CO2 laser, but pretty much everything else need to be tweaked. Cooling, exhaust, alignement is a bitch, no bed z height adjustment, etc... It's not even up and running for me as I had to realign the gantry, fix the exhaust, had a few safety measures (analog power meter instead of digital which is crap), and now I need to align the laser. In retrospect, I should have cashed out a little bit more.

The snapmaker serie seems a good option, except that their 10w laser is a laser diode, so it can't cut through acrylic, and I'm really not comfortable with their enclosure filtering the laser wavelength. I do have one though, but I'm really super cautious around it. It's great for wood engraving and cutting though.

You get what you pay for, these cheap lasers are cheap for a reason. Proper exhaust, proper cooling, and installing an analog ammeter is pretty much standard good practice for the K40’s bigger relatives too. I did all that for my 50W (that OmTech will tell you is a 60w or 55w depending on what you read).

These aren’t as simple and easy to use as 3D printers. But they’re not rocket science either, and if you’re serious about designing and making things they’re powerful tools. And combine great with 3D printers. I posted some examples of projects that use both in the laser thread.

I understand the same color within a layer (I've used this method for phone cases), but was just confused why you would do it on a model where colors where stacked. Seems like more effort and potential pain. I've used this process a few times when a print failed and I wanted to resume instead of starting over. I've been successful in some cases, but not in others (e.g. I forgot to program the extruder movement correctly so it knocked into the model before rising to the correct Z height).

Sounds like an opportunity to write a program that takes a gcode file and steps through the print head movements so you can insert a filament swap exactly where you need it. Then it would be easier to do multi colors on the same layer without running into print head issues.

Might get a little messy if you need to do a lot of swaps but it would be neat to try.

In Bambu slicer, I believe what you are referring to is called a "pause" moment" for the gcode. Not sure how other slicers handle this. I have only just started using Bambu.

I could be wrong but in both Cura and Slic3r you can add a pause but only at the start/end of a layer. I am not aware of any way of inserting a filament change in the middle of a layer other than manually going through the gcode and inserting it exactly where you need it.

Here is an example of combining colors in a layer with a single nozzle:

Ok, so it the same way then, manually as well. Bambu makes us Pause and re-slice each time. Your idea would be much simpler with gcode.

I've found a couple of Fusion 360 tutorials on making these types of signs but they are either in German or French. While I can apply cc translations to the videos, would be easier to follow if in English. For the Fusion 360 users out there, did you reference some tutorial in English or just figure it out on your own?

Yes. This is the technique I used. It’s pretty straightforward and looks way better than stacking IMHO for that little sign I made

All these import laser systems need a ton of re-engineering. I bet most of them are a poor copy of the early (20 years ago) universal systems (https://www.ulsinc.com/)

I live with the challenges because my Redsail cost 4k used. I have had to redesign much of it. Many of the original import design decisions are laughable. but as Aurich says you get what you pay for...

I have a friend who has a universal system, He paid 80k for it.

Care to share the link so I can print one for my own use in the game room?

Just received shipment notification from Bambu. ETA is this Friday, but I assume it will be late as the entire city is shut down due to ice until it starts to melt sometime tomorrow.

Good News.

Have you ever made a topper for Demolition Man?

I’ve been looking at getting carbon…so tempting!

Thingiverse sucks. Posted to Thangs.com.

https://thangs.com/designer/king_pin/3d-model/mechagodzilla_left_3d_sculpt.stl-683478
https://thangs.com/designer/king_pin/3d-model/mechagodzilla_right_3d_sculpt.stl-683471

Please post prints if any of you get these printed and or painted! Hope it works out for you.

Sorry I should of clarified not my design. Here it is on thingiverse https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5078799 The creator has Deadpool, Avengers and Junkyard toppers on his page.

Yes please post them! Hope they work out for you.

I got my tracking the other day as well. Mine is set to be here Monday, signature required... Meaning I will miss the package and have to pick up the following day.

Super excited!