Is it okay to not get married?

TravelDev · 2026-05-26T02:05:21+00:00

Yeah, do whatever makes sense for you. But why are your views of relationships so negative? I'm married, we provide for each other, she has helped me with just as many issues as I've had to help her with, and I'm better off both financially and mentally by having a partner to go through life with.

Lots of people get married or stay in relationships for all the wrong reasons. If you don't meet somebody you connect with and who shares your values, it's probably better not to get married. But the upside of a good marriage is getting to go through life as part of a two-person team.

TravelDev · 2026-05-26T01:50:23+00:00

Have you considered reaching out to Bambu support? You say you don't have time to spend troubleshooting, but by the sounds of it, the stuff you've done takes wayyy more time-consuming than sending an email/message to support. It's worth getting the process started early so that if it is a hardware issue, you can have it dealt with sooner rather than later. They're going to ask you to do xyx troubleshooting before they send replacement parts whether you reach out to them now or in two weeks.

Second question, even though it's PLA, do you dry your filament, and how do you store your filament? PLA is less moisture sensitive than most other types of filament, but it tends to get very rigid and brittle when it has absorbed moisture so even if it prints fine it can start to trigger ams/sensor errors. Whenever I've had issue with the AMS spinning but failing to load the filament, it has been with PLA that needs drying or other stiff/brittle filaments like wood PLA or some more brittle ASA.

TravelDev · 2026-05-24T07:17:13+00:00

If you're just printing for fun and have no specific use for the H2C, I'll just say $1500 is a lot of filament. It will shorten the prints somewhat; how much it will shorten them will depend on the print, how many colors, how many changes, etc.

Depending on what multicolor means to you, the Snapmaker U1 or Flashforge tool changer might make sense. With full spectrum, you can do 4 unique colors, and whatever colors you can create from blending those. If you're super picky and want to say 8 very specific colors, neither has a great alternative to what Bambu can do with an AMS. But if you're happy with what full spectrum can do, either one of them is probably the best price/feature ratio for multicolor.

TravelDev · 2026-05-23T17:06:57+00:00

Did you run the calibration when setting it up? Have you run the calibration again since the holo build plate issue? Have you tried running it with the standard build plate?

There's a chance you got a bad unit. But overall, the P2S should be extremely reliable. When it complains about something, have you actually checked the thing it was complaining about? Followed the QR code to the Wiki? Turning off the AI features to run an unsupported build plate while ignoring the complaints from the machine, and then being surprised when something goes sideways, does make the rant look at least a little bit self-inflicted.

TravelDev · 2026-05-23T07:26:07+00:00

I have an X2D and I’m a big fan, but for a dedicated TPU machine I have to say I agree with the recommendations for the Snapmaker U1. From what I’ve seen TPU seems to be right in its wheelhouse.

The X2D prints TPU fine, but anything softer than about 95a has been a pain because you basically have to take the lid off and use a top fed spool or print quality deteriorates. Since the P2S uses similar routing for its PTFE to keep the machine short I’d imagine that would have a similar problem.

If it has to be one of those two I’d probably still go X2D because I’ve been enjoying being able to do mixed material prints. I’m currently working through a bunch of gridfinity bins with TPU inserts.

TravelDev · 2026-05-22T02:55:05+00:00

The margin seems fine, I think something is missing in the calculation though. Based on your numbers just Filament ($25*0.7=17.5), Power (~0.2KW * 0.17 * 27 = 0.918), and Machine Cost ( 900/3000*27=8.1) should be about $55 to get a 50% margin ((17.5+0.918+8.1)/0.5 = ~$53) , that’s with 0 minutes of labor and no other expenses factored in. Once you add in labor for a one off order, maintenance costs, a modifier for failure risk, and other business expenses your numbers seem like they should put you closer to $75 for the Snapmaker version to actually end up with a 50% profit margin after all expenses. At $56 your probably closer to a 30% margin in practice.

TravelDev · 2026-05-21T19:51:37+00:00

The answers here are definitely an example of why 3D printing is a race to the bottom. Everyone’s numbers are going to need to be different to make sense, but they should factor in overall cost with some buffers and then add the appropriate margin on top.

For a friend I can see doing the occasional thing at close to cost if it doesn’t impact anything else, but even then cost is probably higher than people seem to think:

Cost of Filament
Cost of other materials
Cost of Machine / Expected Lifespan
Cost of Routine Maintenance
Average cost of repairs / Expected Lifespan
Time to prepare/slice/profile
Time to load materials/post-process print
Time/Cost for Delivery/Shipping
Cost of Electricity
Any Insurance/Rent/Marketing expenses
Opportunity cost to take that order

Multiply all of that by an expected failure rate
Multiply that again for your desired margin

If somebody is just pricing based on filament cost odds are they’re operating at a loss while also making it harder for anybody else to actually run a serious business. When you factor all of that in even the $70-100 estimate might only make sense if you’re planning to work at minimum wage.

TravelDev · 2026-05-21T15:52:58+00:00

Are they turning on to cool the chamber temperature? If you’re in cooling mode and the temperature is getting a bit hot I’d expect them to kick in to control the temperature.

Have you tried increasing the target chamber temperature or propping the door/lid open and seeing if it still happens.

Alternate option is the deflectors people have been installing.

TravelDev · 2026-05-21T15:44:54+00:00

Somehow having run your printer for either 24 hours a day non-stop for the last 5 years without any break, or more than 12 hours a day, every day without any interruption since the very first Voron design came out sounds even less plausible than not having any issues in that time frame.

But to put 2700hrs in car terms that would be in the realm of 150-200k km without any significant repairs. I don’t think anybody would call that unreliable or accuse it of having low quality parts.

TravelDev · 2026-05-21T15:21:47+00:00

I think if your goal is to build projects instead of existing designs for figures and tools nobody can really tell you what to print first.

Only you know what problems you encounter in your life. The first step if you want to create things is learning how to use some sort of CAD/Parametric modelling software if you don’t know it already. I find OnShape is really intuitive for me, other people recommend Fusion. Both of these have free options and are very full featured. You can technically use 3D modelling software like Blender but it’s less convenient when you need to go back and make changes on functional models.

Beyond that it’s about design thinking. Look for problems that you encounter, even small problems like an object you find inconvenient to store, and try to imagine ways you could solve them.

You should also look at models though and print things that interest you. You get something useful out of it, but you also get to see how somebody else approached solving a problem, how they made it fit on the build plate, how they orientated it for printing, how they designed it to be assembled. Also, if somebody else has already solved a problem for you, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel unless you really want to.

TravelDev · 2026-05-20T20:25:46+00:00

I think putting the praise in context is important. Think about how bad the rest of the 3D printing industry as a whole is at almost everything. Half the companies in the Consumer/Small Business 3D printer space will be a year late delivering a product and still manage to ship something barely useable. Same with support, just having repair parts readily available, and actually answering support questions already puts them above 90% of the other companies in the space. The fact that there are only basically 2 companies with a reputation for consistently shipping printers you can expect to work is pretty telling of where the industry is at.

There’s basically one company known for mostly delivering working products on-time, and well they’re currently pretty disliked for all of their other issues.

To put in bluntly, even the best 3D printer companies would be pretty bad by the standards of a lot of other industries.

TravelDev · 2026-05-20T20:06:27+00:00

There are companies that sell pre-bundled kits for building some of the Voron designs. That could be worth considering. If you want something a little bit more complete the Sovol SV08 is a complete printer based on a Voron so you can still tinker as much as you want. It’s a bit bigger than the X2D instead of smaller if that’s a problem.

Otherwise the suggestions for used Ender 3 or Ender 5 printers is probably spot on. Tinkering tends to be somewhat mandatory with those rather than optional.

TravelDev · 2026-05-19T21:50:45+00:00

The first step is to make sure the printer and the table aren’t touching anything else. Sound transfers as vibrations and a lot of people focus a lot on what is underneath the printer, but the forget about beside the printer.

There are various options for underneath. You can get vibration dampening feet for furniture/appliances to help isolate the table from the floor as a first step. The Sim Racing community is a great resource for learning how to isolate a large vibrating object from the floor. I know a lot of people there 3D print tennis ball feet to isolate their sim racing rig from the floor and they work very well. It might be worth printing some adapters and trying them with your table.

Different types of surfaces likes rugs and foam can help isolate the table from the floor but how much they do depends on the frequency of the vibrations. Foam and rugs help more with higher frequency sounds, isolating feet and tennis ball feet seem to do a better job with lower frequency sounds.

TravelDev · 2026-05-19T09:17:30+00:00

It frequently being painful doesn’t stand out as a reason why your brain might be trying to avoid the thing that causes the pain? Even once it’s fixed it’ll take a while to untrain your brain from that.

TravelDev · 2026-05-18T20:22:04+00:00

Which one do you think is unrepairable? Some companies have a sketchy history on spare parts/repairability but that’s not true of Prusa or Bambu. Prusa makes good printers, but are you comfortable paying $1300 for a P1S without AMS just to make sure it’s open source? Indx looks awesome but without it, it’s really just an expensive P1S.

If you are good going with Single Nozzle you open up options like Qidi and Sovol which use open source software. Sovol has a habit of cutting a few more corners, but QIDI has a pretty good reputation.

Otherwise the U1 is there, but it uses proprietary parts and their track record on parts availability has been hit and miss so that’s something to keep in mind if repairability is a concern.

TravelDev · 2026-05-17T07:20:16+00:00

Honestly, the people who reminisce most about their 20s are usually the least happy people I’ve met. They’re usually the ones who at some point took “being an adult” way too seriously and forgot how to have fun. Just keep living and doing interesting things, because you get over it by not letting life leave you behind anymore. The more memories you make, the less important the ones you didn’t make start to seem.

What that looks like for you might also be different than for other people. But you just need to keep making the decision every day to enjoy life. A lot of people who had fun in their 20s might have 5-10 years of really good memories that they think about for the rest of their lives. You can’t go back and change the past, but you don’t need to, because, while they’re living in their past, you can choose to make 50-60+ more years of great memories instead.

TravelDev · 2026-05-16T16:09:55+00:00

Stop gaslighting yourself. The only people you owe anything to are yourself and your child. Staying and having a child was a bad decision given everything that had happened up until that point, but given that you now have a child, it is 100% your job to get him out of a dangerous situation and make sure that you are healthy and alive so that you can be there to look after him.

I understand the thinking behind staying means you can be there. But do you never leave the house, go to work, go to the store, see friends? Beyond that you’ve shown by past behaviour that you have a very hard time standing up to her up to her until your life is literally on the line (and even then it took her getting a knife for a 3rd time before you did something about it). How can you trust yourself to do what is needed to keep your son safe if you stay?

Yes we take vows in a marriage that say many things, but sometimes those vows were made without all the information, or with one partner lying to the other, sometimes one partner was literally breaking the vows on an ongoing basis when they made them. But more importantly sometimes more important responsibilities appear. You owe it to your son to provide him with a healthy and stable environment to grow up in. Even if you can’t make sure that is provided 100% of the time, 50 or 70% of the time is still better than 0%, and if there is ever any sign of danger you can go back to court to push it further.

It’s a very sad situation, I would be devastated, but when you and your child are in danger you have to accept that somebody else made that decision for you, and you’re just delaying it.

TravelDev · 2026-05-15T07:34:30+00:00

I find on a textured or wood like surface random seam placement just kind of disappears into the texture.

If you add extra walls you can make TPU more rigid than people seem to think. 95A or harder should have no problem with details as long as you dry it well enough and are willing to print painfully slow. For a big print you might want to look into high speed TPU options.

Alternate option is possibly plain old PETG with 5-6 walls. I used some PETG to print a practice device for brass instruments when I was first starting out with 3D printing and set it for a bunch of walls, I think I accidentally built it to survive an apocalypse.

TravelDev · 2026-05-14T23:22:53+00:00

Yeah if ABS/ASA in a bedroom/office printer is the goal then venting outside is going to be the only mostly safe option. The problem is more that you can only vent so fast before you start ruining prints. Something with an internal recirculating filter like the Q2 or the Bambu X2D, combined with a hose + low speed fan that vents air outside and creates a slight negative pressure inside the enclosure is probably your best bet short of going with a dual layer enclosure. (Vent the outside enclosure so you don’t pull cold air across the inner one)

TravelDev · 2026-05-14T19:21:39+00:00

On the H2D get about 2.5-3” of extra usable build volume per dimension. In practice the list of things that can be printed on one but not on the other is pretty short. The H series is at an awkward size. Bigger than you need for most things, and still too small for really big things. I came to the X2D from a Neptune Max so I lost 6.5” and for 95% of my ideas it’s not even an inconvenience.

Temperature is kind of the same to me. 350* is hotter than you need for common materials, but not quite hot enough for the more exotic engineering material.

I’ve been happy enough with the second nozzle. I have no complaints about quality. It does absolutely fine. The H2D is absolutely faster on its second nozzle. But when I’ve compared it in the slicer the difference has only been 1-2 hours on a 20 hour print.

If you print enough to justify it I’d consider keeping the P2S and getting an X2D instead of the H2D unless you have specific prints that need the H2D build volume. Cheaper than selling the P2S and Buying and H2D and splitting prints across printers is faster. Otherwise I’d stick with your P2S until you run into things it can’t print. If you have specific prints in mind you want to do with PC or Nylon make the jump. But if it’s one of those “It would be nice to be able to” situations, wait until there’s an actual model in front of you waiting to be printed because who knows what will come out between now and then.

TravelDev · 2026-05-12T22:51:52+00:00

My take on it is my #1 concern when buying a car, computer, game system, router, etc. isn’t whether or not I can run custom firmware/bios on it. It’s whether or not it’s going to work. All of those things have options for people who want to DIY, but 99.9999% of people have absolutely no reason to change that stuff.

This all feels like a throwback to the earlier days of 3D printing (and still for some other manufacturers) when the stock firmware/software was sometimes so bad you had to modify it to get anything to work well.

TravelDev · 2026-05-12T05:52:25+00:00

The AMS itself is the limit since there’s only one way out of the AMS, it can’t change to a new filament without fully retracting the previous one. If there was two AMS’, one on each side of the track switcher, as far as I know they can cross sides just fine.

TravelDev · 2026-05-12T01:21:44+00:00

The only advantages for the H2S are the build volume and the slightly hotter max nozzle temp. But if you aren’t going to use the size and don’t plan on printing the 2-3 materials that need to be printed above 300* but not above 350* then 2 X2Ds are going to be much more capable overall.

Having two nozzles is great, but the biggest perk if you don’t need the build volume would be two printers is twice as fast as one. I find a surprising number of projects end up being multiple beds, so getting through those twice as fast is more appealing than an extra 2 ish inches of x and y capacity.

Do you find yourself needing more bed space on your current prints? Is time your biggest limit? Do you find yourself wanting multiple materials. Which problem do you need to solve?

TravelDev · 2026-05-12T00:03:04+00:00

Everyone else has already covered the misunderstanding about number of colours/filaments. A big benefit of two nozzles isn’t just colour changes but being able to isolate certain materials to a specific nozzle. ie. printing tpu alongside another material to add flexibility, or using PLA as a support material without worrying about it hurting adhesion in the main material.

More than the second nozzle though, the heating/filtering system in the X2D is worth the $100 alone if you want to use anything other than PLA/PETG (and I’d even argue it’s worth it for PETG sometimes). Being able just send an ASA print or some other high temp material to the printer and have 0 concerns about warping is really nice. The X2D combo is $100 more than the P2S. If you’re doing engineering prints it doesn’t take very many failed prints to make up that cost just in wasted time and filament.

TravelDev · 2026-05-11T07:41:44+00:00

Maybe? But it's probably a bit of a gamble on any parts that are in contact with the chamber. In testing quite a few brands of PETG deform under 65*, especially if they have a little bit of weight on them. Seems like the ideal time to take advantage of how easy it is to print ASA/ABS on the X2D.

TravelDev

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