3-D Print General - Feeding Printers Filament

[Susanna]

Printed a rifle stock and foregrip for my pistol, used PETG. Really fun to play around with what I suppose is now technically a Margolin carbine, especially once I managed to put a red dot sight on it.

 

[Zjierb]

Printed a rifle stock and foregrip for my pistol, used PETG. Really fun to play around with what I suppose is now technically a Margolin carbine, especially once I managed to put a red dot sight on it.

How has this held up? I know a critique of PETG in the 3D2A community is flex which is why PLA seems to be the go-to. I've tested some non-standard materials like resins (Formlabs Tough 2000) and it can hold up in the short term, but I haven't done long term testing and I know resins are notorious for being brittle.

 

[Susanna]

How has this held up? I know a critique of PETG in the 3D2A community is flex which is why PLA seems to be the go-to. I've tested some non-standard materials like resins (Formlabs Tough 2000) and it can hold up in the short term, but I haven't done long term testing and I know resins are notorious for being brittle.

Just fine, but it's only been two months and the pistol isn't particularly powerful (it's a .21LR competition pistol).

 

[Waff]

I did think about doing it but as most bottles only give a few grams of filament and you need to clean off glue with acetone, clean out the insides and reshape with a heatgun. I couldn't see it as being worthwhile to invest all the time/materials to do it. Like this guy uses 3kg of filament and an ender 3 to make a machine. It runs his for 2hrs and makes 30g of recycled filament from a 5l bottle, he would need to run the machine for 200hrs+ and recycle 100+ 5l bottles to even just get the original investment back. Unless you want to make it a daily ritual to recycle a bottle in that way I can't see the point, just spend the money you would have spent on acetone and parts to buy actual filament.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1yIe1Pp_Nrg

Actually Im doing that right now. just ordered all the parts for the pulltruder m1 off amazon.


Sidenote is anyone else super suspicious of Internet bambulab shills? any thread or topic talking critiques about bambulab has a million of these guys come in and they all say the same thing about how they had an ender and their bambulab saved everything for them...id typically find it genuine but theres so many of them saying it in the same copy and paste format that it makes me suspicious.

 

[Darkholme's Dungeon]

Internet bambulab shills

They're like NVIDIA of the 3D world in that if you talk shit, they'll go out of the way to blacklist you AFAIK. It's TBTF for China now I think.

There is a conspiracy about Bambu labs and the whole security bullshit locking out the 3rd party slicers and requiring the cloud print for everything, was that it was an attempt to crack down (keep an eye) on Chinese people printing firearms in China since a lot of the americans were talking about that on Xiaohongshu.

Spoiler: conspiracy

I think this had to do with that recent directive about bootloaders and hardware by the gov passed this year. Xiaomi had the same issue because the new bootrom unlock process was due to a classified goverment regulation/memo to do so to prevent "unauthorized malware that could scam users" by the PSB/MSS. The goverment there likes to go after the No1 to make an example of them, CORE or Oppo don't have these issues for example (yet).

That security update afaik is mandatory and cannot be turned off in the chinese local models. Other models are also region locked. If you take one from the US to Australia/Europe they will not function aside from USB print (if at all).

The response of "it's misinformation" to that incident was very government like, and I think what's going on is money is being funneled to astroturf them via one of three companies (mainly the shanghai one below).

If you look at the shareholders, there's a "Zhuhai Weichi Management Consulting Partners Limited Company (LLP)" 珠海未迟管理咨询合伙企业（有限合伙） Which is an shell for some state backed fund (so the goverment is involved). It may only have 2.3% stake but Chinese law means that they have a veto over certain decisions (I can't remember if they have to have a party secretary).

There's also a "Shanghai Zhulang Information Technology Partnership (LLP)" 上海竹浪信息科技合伙企业（有限合伙）. This is a pubically suspected shell company for some goverment officals or someone well conected to them and the media.

Finally, there's a "Shenzhen Zhuli Information Technology Partnership (LLP)" 深圳竹笠信息科技合伙企业（有限合伙）. I also suspect this of being a shell for a state owned enterprise. Since they're based in Zhuhai and do mainly US sales, they need to have the connections in Shenzhen (for eletronics), Zhuhai (for the goverment) support, and Shanghai (for the PR).

 

[Combustion Engine]

Sidenote is anyone else super suspicious of Internet bambulab shills? any thread or topic talking critiques about bambulab has a million of these guys come in and they all say the same thing about how they had an ender and their bambulab saved everything for them...id typically find it genuine but theres so many of them saying it in the same copy and paste format that it makes me suspicious.

I believe them. Not because I don't think there's shills: 3d printing has tons of them, most involve chinese brands playing dirty and you always see them come out whenever some safety hazard is discovered with a printer or there's some drama like the walled garden growing taller around them. Not only that but they also always pick up fights and leverage buyer remorse and so on. I believe them because tons of people's first 3d printer were Ender 3s, they were extremely cheap, and Creality's utter, unmitigated incompetence, absence of any proper QA, refusal to improve over completely flawed designs and issues (including proven fire hazards!) over iterations buckbroke hundreds of thousands. Creality's corner-cutting at the expense of safety, quality, and reliability cannot be understated, pure undiluted chink mentality. Quite literally the modern day makerbot (and hopefully dying the same, miserable way), except you could get them for 100-200 dollars half a decade ago (so cheap!) instead of having a four-digit price tag for a piece of shit that's a complete lottery whether it'll serve you well or forever give you issues. There's a market for people that want 3d printing as an hobby, not maintaining a 3d printer, they nailed it down for a small price premium, addressed most issues with them, and all those that didn't know what they were getting into when they were shilled enders as their first printer at the peak of their popularity many years ago discovered it doesn't have to be that way, so obviously they're in love with it.

 

[Waff]

I believe them. Not because I don't think there's shills: 3d printing has tons of them, most involve chinese brands playing dirty and you always see them come out whenever some safety hazard is discovered with a printer or there's some drama like the walled garden growing taller around them. Not only that but they also always pick up fights and leverage buyer remorse and so on. I believe them because tons of people's first 3d printer were Ender 3s, they were extremely cheap, and Creality's utter, unmitigated incompetence, absence of any proper QA, refusal to improve over completely flawed designs and issues (including proven fire hazards!) over iterations buckbroke hundreds of thousands. Creality's corner-cutting at the expense of safety, quality, and reliability cannot be understated, pure undiluted chink mentality. Quite literally the modern day makerbot (and hopefully dying the same, miserable way), except you could get them for 100-200 dollars half a decade ago (so cheap!) instead of having a four-digit price tag for a piece of shit that's a complete lottery whether it'll serve you well or forever give you issues. There's a market for people that want 3d printing as an hobby, not maintaining a 3d printer, they nailed it down for a small price premium, addressed most issues with them, and all those that didn't know what they were getting into when they were shilled enders as their first printer at the peak of their popularity many years ago discovered it doesn't have to be that way, so obviously they're in love with it.

I can't really be too mad at creality. They were the ones that made 3d printing affordable to a lot of us. I can't say though that my first printer was a creality cause it was not... it was a biqu b1. Since they don't make their hotends anymore I had to 3d print it a new hot end enclosure that let me use a generic v6. I printed every single part for that with an ender though with little to no issue. Yeah I did have to place blue tape down to get the petg to stick but I know if something goes wrong with it I can simply hop on the thingiverse and get some pieces to make the unit work better than it was initally. what I am getting at is that Enders are in fact cheap but they also force you to learn a lot about their mechanisms which results in you not having to be so self reliant on their company when things go wrong. Bambulab teaches people nothing but the mentality of a an apple user/hp user where if one thing goes wrong they have no way of learning things cause everything is so locked down which forces most who may even have a diy mindset to "just buy a new one"

 

[DavidS877]

My latest 3d printing win was that I have an older Ikea Billy bookcase, but in the newest ones they moved the holes for the doors, and I bought newer doors. So I spent 10 minutes in OpenSCAD making a jig and then an hour printing and 2 minutes drilling and now my holes are in the right place and I have fancy doors on my bookcase.

My first printer was a Monoprice Maker Select. Which required quite a bit of tuning. Then I got an Ender 3, then an Ender 5 plus, then a Creality K2 Plus. The Enders both got significant upgrades, entirely new controllers, hot beds, power supplies, hot ends. The Cloud(tm) was never a problem with them since they had no cloud features. Once I got the K2 I sold the 5 Plus since I didn't need 2 big printers. The 3 still gets used for "special" filaments, like a Polycarbonate+ASA blend right now for structural parts.

Creality wants the K2 to be like Bambu, but it's all based off Open Source, even if they don't release it. So I promptly shoved it behind a firewall with only NTP access to the Internet and disabled all the Creality crap on it, leaving Klipper/Fluidd/Moonraker running. Some day someone will likely have a full firmware replacement but until then I'm happy with the de-crapified version.

 

[Fear&LoathinginMcDonalds]

Some recent prints I've pooped out

a tiny army of dangle ornaments for stocking stuffers



These THOR mechs on printables were absolutely worth the 7 bucks, ive printed half a dozen of them so far.

Kinda want to design some kind of tabletop skirmish game around them. Could be a fun project.


Also finished up this Corser Mando build.
PSA Dagger G19 slide with a MAF arms parts kit and a MCXish brace.

Currently working on an optic plate mounted charging handle but my retard ass bought a docter cut slide so getting all the geometry exactly right has been tricky.

Super proud of this build though. It has a baby brother thats just a standard compact g19 version of the Corser frame. Excited to take them both shooting after the holidays.

Gonna take the plunge and build a from-scratch FGC9 soon as well. Got like 80% of the stuff I need for the ecm process. Just need the hydraulic piping and a pump.



Been printing for a little over a year on an Ender 3 v3 se. Recently started having some issues with the bed leveling probe so im thinking it might be time to upgrade after tax season.
I enjoy the hobby a lot and hope 3d printers eventually become a ubiquitous appliance in every home.

Merry Christmas everyone and happy printing!

 

[Rekeita's Kidneys]

Gonna take the plunge and build a from-scratch FGC9 soon as well. Got like 80% of the stuff I need for the ecm process. Just need the hydraulic piping and a pump.

Almost done with mine, just need to weld the bolt lol.

I went the lazy fag route and just got a cheap Glock 19 barrel. You can print a spacer/retainer/whatever the fuck to hold it in place. Seems to pretty damned sturdy.

 

[Orange Rhymer]

I didn't get a lot of printer time in 2025, I had a tough year at work. However, this is what I did learn...

-2024 was the AMS/MMU/CFS revolution, 2025 was the Toolchanger revolution

-Prusa became a little less open source with the XL

-Bambu printers have a fire potential:

Spoiler: Bambu Fire source (one)

-The Stratasys patent over bricklayering is being questioned and/or ignored (fuck Stratasys):

Spoiler: Bricklayer source

The Prusa XL has the potential to change not only colors in each head, but also nozzle diameters and layer heights.

Spoiler: Prusa XL-diff nozzles source

Prices right now are pretty good:

https://auroratechchannel.com/3d-printer-price.php

Personal observation.
I feel that the industry is running farther away from the original vision of the RepRap project, into a market sector that does little service to the original vision.

https://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap

but this guy gets it

Spoiler: replicator that might work, some day

 

[Fear&LoathinginMcDonalds]

Public service announcement: if you are upgrading/installing a new hotend on your printer, be sure to plug the part cooling fan and the block fan into the correct sockets.

Just spent the better part of two days scraping shitty spaghetti messes off a bed, trying to figure out why my shit is clogging so much, and if my printer has always been this loud as soon as I turn it on.

 

[Yandex Captcha Solver]

Did FreeCAD's interface get that much better with the 1.0 release? I was able to do a few functional designs without a ton of difficulty. Ran into one major roadblock with adding knurling to a part but figured it out with a 10 minute Youtube video.

I remember the last time I tried it about two years ago it was absolutely terrible and ended up giving up after a few hours and just ran Fusion360.

 

[Fear&LoathinginMcDonalds]

Might have already been mentioned in the thread, but more fun anti-3D2A bills being pushed through

 Washington State:
HB-2320
HB-2321

and New York:
AB-A2228
NY-A01777

Article about New York efforts.

Looks like theyre trying to go after any kind of cnc system now.
As with a lot of gun control bullshit, this seems entirely unenforceable when you can just flash custom firmware onto a board in 5 minutes and airgap your print server.

Also lol at 'misdemeanor for disposal of digital instructions'

Go straight to jail for pressing delete.

Our lawmakers are entirely unserious.

 

[Dr. Sexbot]

The Prusa XL has the potential to change not only colors in each head, but also nozzle diameters and layer heights.

Spoiler: Prusa XL-diff nozzles source

https://youtube.com/watch?v=q2jPQWGF4qE

I have an XL at work, it's completely separate tools so there's no reason outside of the slicer software that you can't do that. With the INDX coming soon for the Core One, I suspect the Prusa Slicer support for multi tools will have some incentive to improve. I myself am very eagerly awaiting that upgrade and will order one as soon as they're available.

 

[BotulismSandwich]

Hadn't printed a single thing since August since I couldn't be fucking bothered anymore.
Every time I go on Printables I see the same useless shit like "haha meme XD" name tags, Bambu branded trash (why the fuck are you putting their logos in your designs? Does a woodworker carve "DeWalt" or "Milwaukee" into their own works?), wannabe-Prusa branded "wowee hexagons!" nonsense or general pop culture slop, even when I look for specific functional items relevant to me rather than worthless trinkets.
Thingiverse is 10x worse for this, has been for years as it's 90% stupid shit.

Workplace bought an industrial printer recently with a 6 figure price tag, finally I have any sort of motivation to resume after seeing it in action. I'm so tempted to ask to print a CF-Nylon Stealthburner assembly to replace the worst mistake I ever made for my Ender 3, the Hero Me printhead. What a pile of shit that is.

 

[Battlefield42]

FreeCAD exists. You can use it to model your own things you can print.

 

[BotulismSandwich]

FreeCAD exists. You can use it to model your own things you can print.

FreeCAD's a joy thief, at least the versions I used pre-1.0. Having to fully constrain every dimension is such a load of bullshit and a timesink when you're sketching relative to other features in the part, especially for me having started out mesh modelling in Softimage and Blender. I'd like a happy medium where I could just fuck around with the modelling and only constrain what geometry I want to.

 

[Susanna]

Pirate SolidWorks.

 

[DavidS877]

Just use OpenSCAD like a normal person.
I've made many exciting projects that involve a cube with holes in various places.