Category Archives: possibly useful

Sometimes it’s just nice to have the right tool

Posted on December 11, 2015 by paulwallich

It’s holiday-cookie time, and the new beater we got for our 15-year-old stand mixer didn’t fit. It went partway on the shaft and then jammed. Grr. So this morning I went down to the basement and over to the old … Continue reading →

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More Big-Nozzle Fun

Posted on December 4, 2015 by paulwallich

This may actually be useful for other people. When I went to test different extrusion speeds for my 0.75mm nozzle on the Ubis13 I was concerned about how fast I could go and still have the heater keep up with … Continue reading →

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3D printer nozzle wars

Posted on November 30, 2015 by paulwallich

I finally got around to trying the  0.75mm nozzle on my Metal Plus. It arrived before the holiday, but I didn’t have the time to make a custom wrench for it (the flats appear to be just a hair too … Continue reading →

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Bending acrylic is easier than I thought

Posted on November 11, 2015 by paulwallich

This summer I took the little radiant space heater down from the ceiling of the woodshop — it really wasn’t doing much to keep me warm out there.  And we’ve had the scraps of a bunch of broken acrylic storage … Continue reading →

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Ubis 13: Just a better hot-end?

Posted on October 6, 2015 by paulwallich

So the all-metal hot-ends finally arrived, and I fixed the Metal Plus so I could actually use them, and I’m a convert. First, of course they make it possible for me to print with filaments I couldn’t use before, like … Continue reading →

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Yet another tiny robotic car

Posted on September 9, 2015 by paulwallich

Yes, it’s made mostly out of random parts I had lying around. That’s sort of the point: even if you had to buy all the parts, this thing would be cheap, and if (like me) you accumulate toy and electronic … Continue reading →

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Anti-aging technology

Posted on July 30, 2015 by paulwallich

Along with some of my mother’s tool collection, I inherited her complaint that as she got older her arms were getting too short to read things. Even if I wanted to just crank up the type size, there’s a limit … Continue reading →

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Measure Once…

Posted on May 27, 2015 by paulwallich

This is what happens when you’re trying to design a part to fit something that you don’t have a good model of. These are all the prototypes of the fan duct I made for my printrbot jrv2, starting on the … Continue reading →

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I don’t know whether to be pleased or annoyed

Posted on May 22, 2015 by paulwallich

I got a refurbished  HP laptop off a discount site a couple months ago, so that I could have a machine for doing hacker/maker stuff away from home (we have a macbook, but it’s flakey with arduinos and only runs … Continue reading →

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Label Your Filament

Posted on May 11, 2015 by paulwallich

“Yeah, right, you say, I would never forget to do that.” And then you start getting filament that comes unspooled in a bag, on a cheapo unlabeled cardboard spool, in an unlabeled bag in a box with a label on … Continue reading →

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