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What did you do this weekend?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
My friend works at a distillery and has Fridays off, so we rode bicycles around town then drank some beers on my porch from 6 feet apart on Friday afternoon. It was nice to socialize.
Played (and finished) Everspace, printed a prototype part cooler for some 3D printer upgrades, did yard work, cut the internet line going into my house with a hedge trimmer, drove around with my wife in the car to find open wifi signals at libraries to both just get out of the house and so she could do something involving turnips in Animal Crossing, made brisket chili for this week's meal prep.
Always hell yeah to that.
How do you find 3D printing? What's your general experience with it?
I keep the printer in a closet in my office, so I just slide the door open to find it.
In all seriousness, my experience will be a bit different than a newcomer. My printer is a Creality CR10S5 that is a few years old now. I chose it because at the time it was the largest (and was only superseded last year) hobby level/sub-$5000 printer with a 500mm3 print area and I generally print large items for prototyping. Even now there's only one off the shelf model that has a 100mm greater area (600mm height). If I wanted to go any larger I'd need to spend 10x as much to get an industrial machine (really, I'd just build my own if I needed more volume). So this was an effort in "buy once, cry once" instead of taking small steps up in size. I say that my experiences will be different as the market has shifted from printers that work okay out of the box and need improvements/tweaking to printers that just plain work, are very low cost as the market has matured, and the learning curve has dropped. I've spent another $500 or so on upgrades such as a silicone bed heater, direct drive hot end, print beds, auto-bed leveling, etc. A lot of this was also the cost of me testing what works best for me and my applications as info wasn't as available as it is now. I went straight from absolutely tiny and extremely low quality 100mm print volume $100 delta printer to this behemoth.
As happens with a lot of hobbies I've made some money off of it by printing for others (and so the machine has paid for itself), but mostly just print for my own uses. I don't like trinkets and baubles, so short of a few decorative things for my wife and friends, 90% of the prints have been functional items, prototyping, or production/finished items for other projects. Prototyping is verifying fit and functionality, such as the part cooler, for items that will remain plastic or to test fitment for items I'll CNC out of aluminum on the CNC machine I'm building. Again as with a lot of hobbies this one has caused me to expand into related avenues, specifically I'm building another computer that will perform double duty as the CNC controller and for photogrammetry. I use exclusively AMD hardware in my personal computer as I don't wish to support Intel and Nvidia's business practices, but the easiest way to do photogrammetry is with an Nvidia graphics card due to some dedicated software. So I bartered for an Nvidia 1070Ti in exchange for prototyping and printing for a coworker.
That's a long winded way to say that it had a semi-early adopter learning curve that many won't have today, has caused me to spend even more time/money to get to where I want to be in the hobby, and it has influenced entry into other related hobbies/spending to support the main hobby. Overall enjoyable and suits my preferences to be self sufficient, make my own things, and express my non-artistic creative pursuits.
I spent all weekend slowly packing up my apartment and little by little, moving into my new apartment via a subcompact car. I have about 3 weeks to fully move into my new place so I am taking my time. The goal is to move everything that is small via these short trips then rent a pick up truck to get the last pieces of large furniture.
I also gave our dog its first ever haircut. She is a cavalier king charles spaniel who had not had a haircut ever. Her feathering, while beautiful, was extremely inconvenient to maintain when we allowed her to "be a dog" and play in tall grass. It looks absolutely terrible but I can tell she is much happier with shorter hair.
Got all set up on a new laptop. Purchased a Thinkpad X1E gen 2 a week ago and it came last Friday. Immediately got it set up to dual boot Ubuntu 20.04 and Windows, and now I’ve got a set up where my desk’s dock works with my work laptop (macbook) and personal laptop all through one thunderbolt cable for monitors, power and peripherals. Really happy with it!
Also finally got around to some cable management in our entertainment center. It’s not perfect but its better than it was. I’ve been considering getting a new TV sometime soon, but now that I’ve got all the cables set up I’m thinking I might hold off on that for a while 😅
Caught up with my sleep backlog and played the violin a bit. Can't seem to do much as it's dead week and boy am I ready for the summer hols!
I went mountain biking for the first time. I don't have a mountain bike, so I had to go out poorly equipped. Granted, I wasn't doing anything super hard core. Just riding on logging roads up a mountain, taking the highway back down. Once society opens up again I'll buy a nice bike.
It's beautiful out here in the Sierra Nevada mountains. I gotta say, mountain biking is way more fun than road biking.