I’m getting ready to make some home made bacon. It will take me the whole week to go from raw meat to the smokey deliciousness that is bacon.

Worth it…

Ahh, the Tyranny of the Crowd. The form of governance that has brought you lynchings and even the French Revolution.

Regularly electing new mods will eventually lead to a similar path of only attracting the power hungry, (like any political position). Or you simply run out of qualified people silly enough to put up with the great unwashed masses, (riding herd on a community of ant kind is a very large pain in the arse-- Got that tee shirt don’t want another)

The problem is, by the time you add the enclosure, you are at nearly the same price as a Core One kit. Yes, the SV08 is larger, but unless you are into cosplay printing, that extra size is probably a waste of space.

OK, more directly.

Worrying about about which measurements systems are best and making fun of them is for fools. Use the units that best fits that task at hand. And shockingly enough, it ain’t always Millimeters, centimeters, kilometers or degrees Celsius. Maybe it’s pounds, feet, miles, or AU’s and Light years.

The US is a metric country. The federal government passed a law in the early 1970’s to make it so. They just didn’t pass a law forcing the change at a set time and date. They decided, for better or worse, to let the change happen organically. And change it has. Go in any grocery store and look at the food on the shelf, it’s all clearly marked in US customary and grams/kilos. I know every pound of butter I buy is 454grams. My whisk(e)y/wine, (choose the spelling you prefer), comes in 750ml bottles. A bottle of soda comes in 2 liter bottles.My FDM printers use 1 kilo spools of filament. We are all looking for that same missing 10mm socket just like the rest of the world. And no one gives a rat’s arse about how many feet are in a mile. Except surveyor’s and civil engineers, a very small and specialized subset.

Did you know there is a error in what the meter actually is? And it’s been there from the very beginning. One of the guys sent to make the original measurements decided that drinking wine in sunny Spain was better than climbing mountains and dealing with bad weather just to measure some silly distance. So he fudged it. The error has been known for quite a while and never corrected. It’s still there even after the switch from using a physical item to define a meter to how far light travels in a set time, (now THERE’S a silly random looking string of numbers). Not very scientific or accurate to ignore the error now is that? I thought the metric system was better than that.

Again for the slow learners, G20/G21 the machines don’t care and no one else should care anymore either.

It’s 1 3/4 bicycles. Not the weird ass decriminalized number you seem to think it is. We do fractions in daily life not decimals.

I saw a yearling buck eating grass along the driveway yesterday afternoon that had only one antler. I wondered if he was 1/2 a buck or a .50 buck since he had just the one spindly fork horn antler. Will all the does think he’s ugly and not breed with him? Will the other bucks laugh at him and refuse his challenges? He will probably end up in someone’s freezer later this fall anyway, so perhaps my story doesn’t really matter.

But the story isn’t about changing anyone’s views on what is the “best” measuring system to use. It’s about the foolishness of it all. G20/G21 the machines no longer care, why do you?

Never attribute pregnancy to what can be simply explained by poor taste.

Special needs often require special materials. You have special requirements and can use those materials. When I have special needs for materials, I just walk up to my garage and machine things out of metals. I have a lathe, mill, drill press, air compressors, and welders. But, I’m that extreme outlier your momma warned you about…Not everyone has the room, knowledge and skills to do that. So, 3D printing is a very good substitute for most people.

Still, don’t dismiss those ‘basic’ filaments either. I have made more than one bending die set to bend up to 10ga/3mm steel out of the cheapest most basic PLA I can buy. It won’t last for 10,000 parts, but I know can can get a dozen bends from it. And more depending on the material and thickness of it. And no, it doesn’t take 100% infill either. 15% or 20% infill is enough. It’s all about the number of walls.

Experiment, try, fail, succeed, and most important, have fun learning.

It’s possible your original Blender design had an issue. Blender is not always kind to 3D printers.

The first thing I would tell you is to stop using cubic infill, it is evil. It never always causes me failed prints, especially larger prints. Nozzles often tend to drag across the previous layers and can easily cause failed prints. I can even hear the nozzle hitting the infill as I print. I often recommend gyroid as a good all around infill pattern.

How to think about this design problem.

I look at it and I wonder, does the rolling pin need to be supported full length? A wooden rolling pin is ridged and only needs minimal support on the ends. So I might just design the cradle only at the very ends. And then design the middle to be a simple flat that connects the two end pieces. I might even skip the middle altogether and just print the ends. That saves the most material and time and still does the job perfectly.

When it comes to slicing your print, orientation matters. How you support overhangs can be tricky and often compromises must be made. While I will use the auto supports as often as I can, sometimes you just need to use paint on supports to get what you needwhere you need it. Pay attention to the top zed support gap. The defaults are never right. I always open them up more. With a .40mm nozzle, I use a .265mm gap. For a .60mm nozzle, a .365mm gap.

You might even need to print your parts at an angle. Often tipping the part at 30 to 45 degree angle can make those nasty over hangs completely printable without supports.

And this is only a good beginning. How fast you might print an overhang matters, the amount of cooling fan can affect the over hang, lots of fine details that you will learn about as you keep doing this.

Good Luck and never fear making a mistake!

A quick and dirty thing to try is to increase your first layer height, .1mm layer is a pretty fine layer line. Bumping the height up can give you a bit more contact area and increase adhesion some. And slow down. The default settings are NOT gospel and the HF doesn’t mean you can or should print that fast. I find when using such fine nozzles I often need to reduce feed rates by 30 to 40% to get things to hold. And I even drop the acceleration rates by 10 to 15% to keep corners from not sticking well.

Speed ain’t everything.

An air fryer is an interesting idea if you happen to have one handy, it’s clever and I like it. But even dedicated filament dryers are a bit cheaper to buy, let alone a used dehydrator. And few people are using expensive engineering filaments either to scratch build printers, though some do.

Personally, I use PETG for phone holders and other items for use in my vehicles. But, where I live it doesn’t hit the 80C required for a PETG phone holder to sag inside my vehicles, even in full sun. And half of the year temps are at freezing or below. PETG lasts for years just fine. So, choosing a filament requires understanding the environment it’s going to get used in and how it gets used. But other places it might be over 100C inside a car. It is, like so much in this world, a YMMV situation. And understanding that, and many other considerations is what makes for good engineering design.

The vast bulk of everything that gets printed involves PLA, PETG, or TPU. They are inexpensive and easily available filaments that are “good enough” for 90%+ of all the things most people print.

*******I must apologize for bad spelling, punctuation, in possibly in comprehensible sentences. I seem to have an orange kitten that wants to have his a=say right now. I think I got things cleaned up.

PETG is tougher and in certain situations stronger than ABS. PETG also has better chemical and UV resistance. But PETG has a lower glass transition temperature, about 80C vs 100C.

Both PETG and ABS/ASA benefit from enclosed and heated chamber printers but PETG is a lot easier to print with an open bed. Both of my printers are open bed and PETG is very easy to print.

PETG is somewhat hygroscopic and will absorb moisture from the environment. Making the filament a pain to print and prone to nasty stringing. So it should be stored sealed in a dry bag/box. Having a way to dry filament is a good idea. You can do so with a cheap food dehydrator or a dedicated filament dry for the purpose.

PETG has pretty much supplanted ABS in FDM printing. It’s often cheaper than ABS these days too. Between PLA, PETG, and TPU, those 3 filaments should cover 90%+ of all your printing needs.

I’m running Kinonite and Fedora Cinnamon spin on my two machines. So I must be at ‘enlightenment’.

Honestly, I’m tired Boss-- so tired. After years and years of fooling around with various Distros, I no longer want to work hard to make my computer work. I like the auto-update feature of Kinonite. Life is short and I ain’t got that much of it left to waste on Arch…

Put down your participation trophy for a minute. It’s nice you feel the need to ride to the rescue, but sometimes the truth just sucks.

OP openly claims to have poor math skills and lacks spatial awareness. If that’s the case, he’s not ever going to have an easy time. Those are 2 skills you need to have, at least to some degree, if you even want to start with designing things. And he naively expects,“free, easy, and professional” results NOW! Then lists his reasons on why he doesn’t like any of the free versions of OnShape and Fusion and FreeCAD. And I doubt OP would do any better with SolidEdge either.

OP wants something he cannot have-- instant skill without personal effort or aptitude, (again from his OWN words). Life don’t work that way Buttercup.

I will be blunt. If you are as bad at math and spatial reasoning as you say, then CAD probably isn’t for you. You will always find it difficult and unrewarding. Design and engineering require a mindset you might not have.

As far as “cheap and easy and professional” CAD they ALL require effort to learn and money to gain entry for commercial versions. CAD is a skill and skills require effort to acquire. And it sounds as if you have no desire to put in very much effort.

For a CAD program to meet your want of cheap and simple, (professional means a lot of money and takes more than a few minutes of effort), look at TinkerCAD. It’s free and simple enough that I teach that to 5th and 6th grade students well enough for them to make simple objects. Ain’t nothing wrong with starting there and learning how to think about design and CAD before you might try and step into more demanding software.

My Wife is notorious for boob dialing me.

Don’t care, I’mma still use the flap to pee when I’m out in the yard.

I’ll allow it. :) :)

Lots of pants out there that have pockets. They often choose not to buy them. And when they do, they put nothing in them.

For what it’s worth, according to my wife and 4 daughters it’s because it’s because if you put things in your pockets like guys do, it ruins the lines and look. And according to our oldest daughter, it’s why cargo shorts and pants look bad on men. And should never be worn.

Like the onion on your belt, those stupid questions were the HR style of the time. No one understood why or what those question were supposed to reveal about the applicant. Just that you needed ask them.

The dangers of letting HR attend conventions…