Ask the Filipinos, who are the ones who both invented and named it. “Butterfly knife” is a western neologism for it.

Dem overhangs, tho. Did you print this upside down, with the open end on the print bed? It looks quite good.

I think PETG is probably a good choice for this application. PLA, especially if it’s thin walled as I suspect it is here, will disintegrate pretty quickly with continued exposure to temperature variations, moisture, and sunlight.

ABS is infamously pretty vulnerable to UV, also. You could protect it (or any of the others, really) with a coat of paint.

As for why: I have no idea! Maybe just for user familiarity reasons, since a lot of people grew up with that kind of analog feedback that the antenna wasn’t getting a signal.

This is exactly why. Preventing screen burn-in may be a tiny peripheral reason also, but providing a familiar experience to chronically myopic and cranky users (i.e. boomers) is probably the bigger one.

The trope of video/audio breaking down into static is an easy shorthand that is unlikely to be forgotten, probably even well after all the devices capable of doing so have long since been buried in the landfill.

It’s especially hilarious in media depicting the far-flung future, where apparently all technologically advanced space men and their communications devices – not to mention high powered central supercomputers and so on and so forth – somehow still work over NTSC television signals. Even by the early 1980’s it should have been entirely predictable that in “the future” anything like that would be digital, considering we already had widespread digital audio media (CD’s), and digital video was already making inroads into the computing industry.

Tube TV’s remained in common service well into the 2010’s. The changeover from analog to fully digital TV transmission did not happen until 2009, with many delays in between, and the government ultimately had to give away digital-to-analog tuner boxes because so many people still refused to let go of their old CRT’s.

Millions of analog TV’s are still languishing in basements and attics in perfect working order to this very day, still able to show you the cosmic background, if only anyone would dust them off or plug them in. Or in many retro gaming nerds’ setups. I have one, and it’ll show me static any time I ask. (I used it to make this gif, for instance.)

In fact, with no one transmitting analog television anymore (probably with some very low scale hobbyist exceptions), the cosmic background radiation is all they can show you now if you’re not inputting video from some other device. Or unless you have one of those dopey models that detects a no-signal situation and shows a blue screen instead. Those are lame.

From a chemical composition standpoint I couldn’t tell you, but my off-the-cuff testing indicates that the glow remains visible for quite a few hours – All night, in fact, though obviously tailing off in brightness considerably as time goes on.

I have a diamond nozzle installed already.

PETG’s issue in this particular application is layer strength, wherein it’s difficult to top PLA except with some semi-exotic and rather hard to print materials like polycarbonate. Both the screws and the blade carrier in my design rely on layer adhesion not failing for durability. Otherwise honestly the parts are all pretty low stress other than I guess potentially the pocket clip.

For a short time in total darkness it actually is pretty bright. Obviously my phone’s camera automatically wound the exposure up quite I bit when I took that picture in the dark, though. That was without any special charge-up, just an hour or so of exposure to the largely LED based lighting in my office with it lying face up on my desk.

This is the Overture brand glow PLA.

I whacked it with my little Lumintop single AA flashlight last night and left it sitting on my bedstand, and found that it was still quite visibly (albeit dimly) glowing by dawn the next morning.

I would say we should just implement it in open source software, anonymously, and let them kick rocks.

If they want to press the issue they can go after whoever-it-is for their “slice” of the infringing revenue generated, which is zero dollars and zero cents. If they want to shut down a project we can just pack it up and pop up elsewhere under a new one. Fuck 'em.

It is obviously already possible on a technical level, at least with varying degrees of ease, using modifications to existing tools. Sefan from CNC Kitchen posted a video a while ago where he managed to pull off and test several prints using brick layered perimeters.

That’s the neat part: I don’t.

Not anymore. I scaled back my fast food consumption quite a bit in previous years, but when the prices of everything skyrocketed to absurd levels during COVID I just quit going to fast food places and never looked back. I get Taco Bell or something like, maybe two or three times a year now and that’s usually when I’m on a road trip or something. Otherwise they can get bent as far as I’m concerned.

If I want slop it’s cheaper and honestly also easier to just buy a TV dinner from any of the selection of general goods stores within walking distance of my house and pop it in the microwave. And these days probably faster, too, because I don’t have to deal with the McAttitude or inevitably discover that the fast food place is trying to run with half the staff it’s supposed to have because its franchise owner is a greedy prick, nor have to worry about getting sucked into the thrice-weekly fistfight in the parking lot, nor getting caught in the crossfire because some fuckmuch is salty about not getting enough ketchup packets and decides to shoot up the joint.

Here’s the problem with that, though. It’s not going to be like there will be roving goon squads going from door to door snatching away your wives and daughters or anything. Even the MAGA-heads are just barely clever enough not to form themselves into any kind of entity that you could physically fight.

Instead, they’re going to chip away at everybody with asinine laws and legislation, selective enforcement and remote harassment, by filing mountains of frivolous lawsuits, etc. They’ll seize property. They’ll get you fired from your job. They’ll kick you off of your health insurance and freeze your bank accounts. Those responsible are never going to actually expose themselves in any capacity in which they can get got, because they’re cowards; they’re going to hide behind their desks and layers of security and fences and metal detectors and cops and the secret service. If it turns to outright violence vis-a-vis war in our own cities, it would be monumentally stupid for them to send troops marching down the street, and they won’t. They’ll just remotely bombard an entire city block and blame all the collateral damage on “leftists” or “wokeism” or whatever. And idiots will believe it, and then blame the victims.

“That’s ridiculous,” you say. “The government would never bomb anyone on US soil.”

You want to bet?

Measuring with the printer is an excellent idea. When in jog mode, mine displays the nozzle coordinates right on the screen.

I was considering that a truly dedicated nut could figure out which layer the print failed at (possibly approximately) and hand edit the gcode for the print to just replace all the layers up until the failed one with Z axis move up to that height. I think that would be problematic, though, because on my machine at least the model still being on the bed would definitely be in the way of the print head homing at the beginning of the print, and I don’t know if there’s any way to force it to skip that part of the procedure. Failure seems likely, and the penalty for failure is high.

Just printing the remaining half of the model and supergluing the parts together seems like a better idea.

My Qidi has a heated chamber and can allegedly do it stock, and I’ve had an unopened spool of pure Nylon sitting in the printer cabinet for over a year.

But I’m chicken.

If your nozzle can withstand it, glass filled is way easier to print.

Your slicer should also be able to compensate for this already.

PLA only shrinks about 0.3% which is negligible unless you are designing with super tight clearances. A 6mm hole, for instance, will be out 0.018mm which is probably scraping against the XY resolution limits of most consumer 3D printers anyhow.

Other materials can definitely shrink more. ABS is harder to manage than PLA, but for instance Nylon/PA’s shrink rate is comparatively immense – around 2%. The various engineering polymers that are filled with something like carbon or glass fibers actually tend to shrink less than their raw counterparts.

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Cripes. I’d dissolve like the Wicked Witch of the West.

If it were me, I probably would not be able to resist the urge to make whatever inserts you develop compatible with a Gridfinity baseplate, because I am that kind of nerd.

To create perfectly console-shaped two dimensional inserts, or at least close enough, I would start by laying each system flat on a piece of paper and tracing around it with a narrow bodied mechanical pencil. Stick this in your scanner and make an image out of it, and then trace over that image at scale in the CAD software of your choice (FreeCAD is… free). This will automatically come with a built in amount of clearance in the amount of half of the width of the body of your pencil.

Just make a flat base with a wall sticking up maybe 2-3mm thick or more if you feel like it, to roughly half the height of each object. You can put some gaps in it if you prefer to have places to grab the item directly.

And for anyone who winds up struggling with this when trying to gauge their own printer, make sure this option is enabled:

This is in Prusa/Slic3r and its derivatives. If this is disabled, the final outer wall perimeter can wind up being pushed out by some fraction of the width of the wall behind it, which will have the net effect of shrinking vertical holes in your model (and other critical clearances in the X/Y dimensions) by an unpredictable amount.

As long as you stay within its plastic deformation limit, “many cycles” should not matter.

PLA’s downfall for flexible design elements is permanent deflection. It cannot be used on anything that is expected to stay in its tensioned state for anything more than a few seconds. This is why PLA works for catapults and toothpick guns and latches that have a single position rest state where the flexible element is relaxed. If you leave it under tension, though, even just for a few hours, it will not spring back fully. Eventually, it just won’t spring back at all.

Through much testing (read: slowly pissing myself off) I determined in the course of developing my Rockhopper that ABS is the best commonly available choice for permanently or semi-permanently loaded printed spring fixtures – at least out of what most normal and sane people can print with their hobby level machines. Even PETG is better than PLA in that respect, but PLA was useless for me.

Given that I’ve consistently pirated Windows since I was tall enough to reach the keyboard, I am positive have never been in compliance with the Microsoft ToS. Somehow, I’m not too worried about it.

Sure, but it’s up from just a couple of years ago when Linux was sub 2%, and was hovering around only 1.5% in, say, 2020.