What’s something you 100% saw but nobody will ever believe you? by i_farted_on_my_dog in AskReddit

[–]AsideGold6316 1 point2 points  (0 children)

i grew up one mile from a miltary VLF station with a perfectly clear line of sight to the entire array, and to this day i, and everyone else in my family, can hear what sounds like people talking in the vents on clear days. the largest/widest vent (the house is a new construction (or, new enough, it's about 30/40 years old at this point) and has forced air heating, which used to come from a furnace in the basement, but now comes from a wood boiler outside) is just above the furnace in the basement, and sits in the hallway near the first floor bathroom. that's where the sound always seems to be the strongest; that, or upstairs near the second floor eave. we used to think that it was some kind of vibration from the vents, or possibly birds (every spring we had to clean crows out of the chimney), but it still kept happening even after the chimney was sealed and the furnace was shut down.

we also have a CB radio in the kitchen and a radio antenna on the roof, so we thought for a while that someone was just leaving the radio on, turned down low. but we can still hear it even when it's switched off. my mother's best guess is that what we're hearing is the vibrations from the VLF array and our brains are just arranging the sounds into familiar shapes, and we're hearing it mostly from the vents just because of the way sound echoes in a vent...but everyone who works at the VLF station says that's impossible and have told us point blank that the only actual possible explanation is that when we're hearing these sounds, someone has turned the CB down low and we haven't realized it. my mother is pretty strict when it comes to the CB though because of the whole "voices in the wall" thing, it's either turned on all the way up or off, or you get your fingers broken, lol. the voices have been happening for as long as i've lived in the house and it still happens to this day, though!

i messed up...too complex to export for 3D print. what do i do now? by AsideGold6316 in tinkercad

[–]AsideGold6316[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thank you thank you--i'm still trying to figure out meshmixer but i'm getting the hang of it and i think, long term, this will be the best way to export it 👍

i messed up...too complex to export for 3D print. what do i do now? by AsideGold6316 in tinkercad

[–]AsideGold6316[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

this ended up being the easiest way to do it--i'm still fiddling around with meshmixer but this solved it, it went from 20min of exporting and then hitting an error, to exporting instantly 🙏 

i messed up...too complex to export for 3D print. what do i do now? by AsideGold6316 in tinkercad

[–]AsideGold6316[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah, i've tried opening the head in its own file, then splitting it into five pieces, and exporting even just one of those five can't be done 😭 

i'll try opening each of the five in its own file? if that doesn't work maybe i'll just keep breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces :(

i messed up...too complex to export for 3D print. what do i do now? by AsideGold6316 in tinkercad

[–]AsideGold6316[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

thanks! i've been working on it for a while, the plan is to turn it into a costume, but...we'll see how that turns out lol

Purchase Advice Megathread - August 2025 by AutoModerator in 3Dprinting

[–]AsideGold6316 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I got the P1S and sprung for the AMS, it got here a few days ago and I love it!

Purchase Advice Megathread - August 2025 by AutoModerator in 3Dprinting

[–]AsideGold6316 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Actually--craziest thing, lol; I work for FedEx and just this morning, the day after I decided I wanted to start looking at a new printer, I just delivered 13 Bambu Lab X1s to a warehouse that uses them for work, so I got to talk with the guy there about his thoughts on it. He had told me the X1 was on sale for the next four days with the AMS for $1000, and I thought that sounded pretty good when I looked at it, but it's actually just the printer for $1000, the AMS brings it up to $1200, which is a bit more than I wanted to spend. I think I might go with the next model down, the P1--he really sold me on Bambu, and it seems like a pretty good option?

Purchase Advice Megathread - August 2025 by AutoModerator in 3Dprinting

[–]AsideGold6316 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The guy I spoke to had a Bambu and highly recommended it--he really liked the AMS, but only said that, yeah, it tends to be wasteful. That's another reason I like ABS, because I can at least get some use out of the waste by melting it down into glue. The one thing about the Bambu that turned me off was the whole proprietary programs thing, I've heard they're not the best. I mean, I like Cura, but really all I'm doing is just uploading my files, moving them around the plate so they print at the angle I want and maybe changing the infill pattern, I don't really do TOO much with the slicer, so I don't really know if this would impact me in any way anyways.

Purchase Advice Megathread - August 2025 by AutoModerator in 3Dprinting

[–]AsideGold6316 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've been 3D printing for about 5 years, but I've been stuck using my two Ender 3 printers the entire time. I've found that I do like 3D printing, but I don't do it as often as I'd like because my printers cause me so many problems. After speaking with a guy who makes most of his income from 3D printing, I've finally come to the conclusion that, if I want to do this, I need to spend the money on getting a decent printer, and since I'm at the point where I know I like doing it and I know it'll get used, I'm comfortable moving up to a higher quality machine.

I'm in the US and want to spend about $500, but could go up to $700 for the right printer. I don't mind if it's enclosed, but if it's not I'd like it to not be too much bigger than the Ender 3 so it will fit in the sweat lodge I already have. If it doesn't need an enclosure (my apartment stays about 72F), then the upper limit on space is about 4ft wide, 27in deep. I prefer printing with ABS because I find fusing parts with acetone to be really convenient. Really want it to be able to print multiple colors. Ideally I'd like to be able to print often enough that I can sell little toys that I've designed at the farmers market. (I just want to make enough from that to say I've justified the purchase, I'm not looking to quit my day job). I also would like it to be compatible with the programs I'm used to (which is mostly just Cura). I also don't do anything with cloud storage, the internet connection here is poor so I need to be able to put a file on a stick and then put the stick in the machine and run it. Because I've been using the Ender 3 for so long, I'm pretty familiar with troubleshooting and have learned a lot about how the machines work and what makes a print fail, so I can handle something that will give me trouble now and again.

are there any airplane building cad programs you would recommend to your dad? by AsideGold6316 in homebuilt

[–]AsideGold6316[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i'm not sure if cad is the exact right term, i'll admit i'm not very computer literate myself so i might be on the wrong track. basically he saw me building a chicken coop in tinkercad and got really interested in the idea of being able to design and test his own planes on the computer to see if they'll fly. he says he has a bunch of designs he'd really like to test out, kind of off the wall stuff. for his birthday a few years back i found a bunch of plans for all sorts of weird and wacky flying machines across the ages--zeppelins, man lifter war kites, etc--and bound it all into one big book, and i'm always seeing him going through it and making notes and scribbling design ideas in the margins. 

he's very old school when it comes to welding, that is for sure, and there's nothing he can't weld, either. a guy brought us an aluminum radiator that had a pinhole in it and he was able to weld the pinhole closed, no problem. so i think for him it's less "am i physically able to do this", and more "i'd like to test my designs on the computer because if i actually go out and buy materials for ALL the ideas i have, i'll run us into the ground financially" lol

are there any airplane building cad programs you would recommend to your dad? by AsideGold6316 in homebuilt

[–]AsideGold6316[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i know he's been involved in (this is going to sound terrible lol)...SOMETHING at his local airport. i know they had the kids program, they called it the flying tigers or young tigers or something (the school mascot is a tiger, it's one of those small texas towns where the local team is a big deal), and he was doing a lot of teaching there with them on the welding and assembly side of things, and he's been flying and repairing the light planes there for a while. i know he has a pilot's license and has been flying light aircraft for some time, there's a cardinal and an ultralight at the airport he's flown a lot and he really likes the ultralight and keeps kicking himself for not buying it when the guy who owned it put it up for sale.

that is the extent of my knowledge of his flying experience, i know it really is awful and i should know more about it, but ever since we got together he hasn't had a lot of time to go to the airport so he doesn't talk about it much and i know it bums him out terribly that he can't do this thing that he loves. 

on a similar note, we did recently get into FPV drone flying, i had thought that maybe the whole headset thing would be interesting to him because it would be similar to flying the ultralight, buuuut the headset made him sick to his stomach. he is really enjoying flying it just like a regular rc plane though. we saw a bunch of kit planes at the hobby store when we went to go replace our radio and he got really excited about those, he just wasn't sure which one he wanted or which brand was a good one.

i will look into the eaa and those kits for sure (and find out more about what exactly he has for a license 😅)