domenica 7 dicembre 2025

My two cents on materials to use in 3D printing.



Ok, me; engineer, prototyper, coming from robotics, hands on mechatronic for industrial automation, I made myself two or three 3D printers out of crappy kits heavilly modified to make them perform as I needed, so they no longer are as bought, including motherboards, nozzles, heatsinks, stepper motors, etc, just the frames are less modified, but not virgin.

I design, print, test, and obviously re-design, for the iterarion of a product from idea to good to sell sometimes takes me to hundreds of re printings and design adjustments.

Why am I saying this?

Glass transiton, that is why.

Some of my products are made to improve 3d printers so that a crappy 200-500USD kit printer can do things normally you got to buy a 30.000 USD printer for, by just printing a few STL files of mine and mounting the prints to the printer, plus some things you buy online, and you go from PLA to... Polycarbonate, Nylon, PPS, printing capacities, and with some more twickening you go to over 400C printing PEEk and ULTEM. On your cheap kit toy, doing things for the big boys only. But without investing like the big boys.

Some other objects I create are designed to stay in a vehicle, be it on the wheels hub, or in the cabin on the dashboard, etc

As you can imagine my creations meet high operational temperatures be it from the heated print bed working just next to them at 120C, or the heatblock at 450C at 3 mm away from my object while printing for 32 hours non stop, or sitting on the dashboard of a car in the summer sun with a 75 C built in cabin heat.

Conclusion; PLA nope (becomes mushy at 50C), PETG nope, ABS neiter, HIPS no no, ASA neither (they all give in around 90C).

I tried them all during the years, they all get mushy and loose their shape, and since they are not decorative parts buut actually functional things, once their shape is a bit compromised, they do not work anymore, they become trash and end up in a bin.

So I modified my machines to go Polycarbonate, with or without Carbon fiber in the filament (Cf filament prints nicer, but becoming more stiff the part also becomes more brittle, is a trade off) or Nylon and similar, for the cheap products, (not as cheap as PLA thou... lol) but if I need to go really reliable mechanical than PPS with or without CF is a good option, and ULTEM (PEI) which is more expensive than PPS but also better heat glass transistion resistance.

PPS has amazingly the same glass transition as ABS (HIPS, ASA) but if anealed it jumps to nearly 200C resistance before deforming.

You will never get that from ASA, HIPS, ABS, PLA or PETG, not even from Polycarbonate, but hey, 150C before becoming mushy is still a good point in many applications, Nylon is a bit lower in that respect, around 140C gives in, but is more plastic deformable tolerant, practically is a pereneal hinge, you bend it back and forth a milion times before you shear it.

There you go, my two cents on materials to use in cheap 3D printers rightly tunned.

sabato 6 dicembre 2025

The nonsense about Trump saving the planet, or Trump destroying the planet...



How disinformed do you have to be to believe the nonsense about Trump saving the planet, or Trump destroying the planet with his policies?

As seen from space; the earth is a sphere, while politics is called... the political sphere, so the center is somewhere on the equator, to its right are the right-wing parties, to the left of the center are the left-wing parties, and on the opposite side of the center are the extreme right and the extreme left which are one and the same thing because the extremes touch and merge with each other.

Until now in the European Community we have had communism on bread disguised as a cardboard carnival with puff pastry, where anything that was extreme left was officially upheld as... left, and the center left was... the center, in conclusion everything that would be authentically center in real therms, for them is already right-wing, and the right was extreme right, and that extreme right... well, that doesn't exist because it has already merged with the extreme left, meaning they are all with them in office anyway.

And behold, until yesterday we had the USSR of Brussels.

Now comes the new order from the heads of the political sphere, no, not from politicians like Macron, Trump, Trudeau, Xi, Kim, or Ursula Von Der Liar, these are just pawns who execute, far above them are those who really command, and they are pushing Trump to move the center to... center right, shifting the authentic center as... center left, and the extremes as we already know are all the same, that is, they touch and merge with each other.

Anything but, as long as we don't have a balanced political center at all, because that would mean the end of invented wars and pandemics, and invented crises of all kinds, that is, their source of money would dry up suddenly and all at once.

So sticking with Trump and his policies is unimaginably stupid, and sticking with EU, Ursula, Macron etc. and their policies is stupidity of exactly the same magnitude (Zelinsky and Ukraine do not count in the equation, they are there just to keep you busy, circens et panem).

For those who have politicians in their pockets will play you at this game like a fool, just as they have been playing you for at least 15 generations that I know of.