Article:

https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/mits-new-liquid-metal-printing-process-enables-rapid-large-scale-metal-3d-printing-227870/

I saw this guy on tv the other day and thought folks here would appreciate the fantastic work he does, and maybe even decide to do similar work for your local children's hospital/hospice?

https://www.3dtoy.shop/

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So I made Gandalf's staffs and put an insanely powerful flashlight in it so I could light it up like he does in Moria.

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I saw someone else did a staff from Final Fantasy and they made it so you just had to bounce it on the ground and a rod inside on a spring (cylindrical boss) turns the flashlight on or off. I thought it was amazing but he wouldn't go into details when I asked him about it so I figured this out myself.

First I got some wood filament to print the staff. It actually smells like wood when you're printing. filament

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The flashlight is what SWAT teams use to blind people and actually gets hot enough to burn you if you leave it on for too long. The flashlight has to be kinda locked into place between the top and the spring attached to the rod that runs the length of the inside of the staff. I put a bolt through the top to hold it in place but it can be unscrewed to take the flashlight out to recharge it. light

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I wanted it to be easy to get to the flashlight so I designed the top to have powerful magnets printed inside it so you can just pull the top off if you need to get to it magnets

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The actual model used for printed is a modified version of this from a very very nice guy on Etsy: staff stl

I had to make the staff much wider to fit the flashlight and boss, then I cut out a lot of inside of the top so there was more room for light to shine out, then the modifications for the magnets.

I used one of these for the internal rod rod spring

I printed a piece here to hold the spring and tap the button on the base of the flashlight. !

and some 1 1/4 Charlotte pipe to put the outter print on as it wouldn't be strong enough if I just used straight PLA pipe

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Printing took about a week straight and once it was assembled my wife used this video from Wesley Treat vid

to make it look like real wood. It took about another week for all the sprays and stains and modge poge and whatnot to dry. This was the stain we landed on stain

I'm pretty happy with the end result even though it is a little heavy. I'm pretty big and I didn't want it to shine directly in my eyes so I sized it to about 6'3 not counting the head piece.

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It is bright as fuck, the videos don't really do it justice. ! !

All said it probably took about a solid week to print all the pieces and then another 2 days to reprint the head after I dropped it and the magnets exploded out immediately stuck together which was both awesome and heartbreaking.

My wife probably ended up doing more work on it than I did. She also added a sort of silver leaf to the inside of the head to make it more reflective when the light is on. There were like 3 layers of that and some shellac to keep it in place.

The plan is to send it with our niece who is into cosplay to the Renaissance fair and see how it holds up for her. I might do a V2 someday where you just hit a button to turn it on so it can be thinner and lighter.

Hope you found the project as interesting as

all images and videos

I ordered the Elegoo Neptune 4 Pro #3dprinter from their US website on Saturday, but does anyone know about how long it should take to ship? Super excited for the new printer!

\#3DPrinting

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Couldn't figure out why part of my print got spaghettied and then saw this guy stuck in the test strip.

Over on Mastodon - though obviously anyone anywhere can participate - there's a weekly monster-film watching event called #Monsterdon where we all watch a movie together and comment as it's running.

One of the regulars made a bingo card for last Sunday's movie, and being a Godzilla movie, I of course had to make 3D-printable TOHO stamps to go with it.

I used 20% wood-infill PHA, since it's got that little bit of softness that helps with things like stamps, and 20% wood infill variant to help take up ink.

Even with an FDM printer and a 0.6mm nozzle I was able to get a very usable/functional result! The positive is only 20mm across (and the negative/invert only a couple of millimetres more) and yet detail is reasonably preserved.

First layer is extremely important, though I guess that goes without saying. But I think you can make some decent - not amazing, not as good as real rubber stamp material, but decent - stamps this way if you wanted.

I love the YT channel Project Farm. It's unbiased, well thought out, practical, and numbers-focused (as much as a video can have without getting boring) approach is refreshing. Not every test is perfect, not every sample size appropriate, but this is a mechanical guy that knows his shit and is as curious about the results as the audience.

His latest video compared a bunch of ratchets from different manufacturers... plus a 3D printed one. Made of carbon fiber nylon and printed with a newly purchased BambuLabs X1 Carbon, it failed miserably.

The problem?

I'd assume it was print orientation. It's printed on its back, with the socket connector pointing up, meaning layer lines are parallel to the force.

But, then I did a little digging...

Here's the presumed model. It's 100% print-in-place. I assumed the instructions would make mention of the correct orientation. They don't. Uh oh, am I the wrong one? Nah, probably just a random, low quality model, right?

Oh, it has a decent number of makes that were presumably done in the default orientation, but maybe... oh, okay I'm deeeeefinitely wrong.

> > > This is the first time an object has been designed on Earth and then transmitted to space for manufacture. > >

I assume it's oriented for printing without much fiddling. Looking at the Thingiverse comments, there are people have success with PLA.

Maybe the temperature was too low to get good layer adhesion. Is CF Nylon brittle? Could leaving the filament out a few days, being so hygroscopic, lead to this?

So, any other ideas out there? Should he have used a different material?

(Also, it's worth mentioning that he specifically says he bought the printer just for this test, so I'm not sure how much experience he has with 3D printing. That's wild to say because if you hear someone say they printed carbon fiber nylon, you assume they have significant experience. But, as an X1C owner myself, that's a totally realistic possibility.)