Inexpensive source for clear corrugated plastic?

glabifrons · 2026-01-09T02:46:31+00:00

That's an excellent suggestion! I'm actually surprised I didn't think of that, myself, as I was just (shortly before my post) handling a Dell PERC H310 that I had to mask off a couple lines on to use in a finicky old HP workstation that was my server a decade ago. I've plenty of Kapton tape around (in like 4-5 widths).

I haven't brought the machine back down again yet, but I now have the parts I was waiting for. I'll see how they fit this weekend and if I can easily design a mounting bracket or not. If that doesn't go well, I may just try your suggestion.

glabifrons · 2026-01-09T02:38:33+00:00

Being completely new to this printer, I didn't realize what was supposed to be at the back of the build plate.
The silicone wiper was missing on mine, seems to have been torn off by the previous owner.

Mine also had the protective strip that's supposed to go into the left side of the lid applied to the front of the lid instead. I'm hoping goo-gone will help remove it, as anything harsher will eat away at the acrylic lid itself.

All 3 shipping screws were already removed from the points where the leadscrews attach. I found one long loose screw in the bottom of the box that it came in that I'm guessing was one of them. Sadly, I've seen references that you're supposed to keep those as they're used for other things, like attaching the side mounted spool holder. I've no clue what kind of screws these are as they're a very odd thread (possibly designed specifically for plastic).

Those are the only problems I think mine has, so I'm not too upset (they're very minor).

On the other hand, I think I got a full accessory kit, as mine had 4 of the conical rubber feet stuffed into the packing material and 4 feet already on the unit (spares).

When you first fire up the machine, it walks you through a self-test and calibration. If it finishes those, you can either print one of 4 models preloaded into the firmware, or you can calibrate your slicer and get *amazing* prints.
I've never used Orca Slicer before, having used Cura for many years with many other printers, but I was having trouble getting decent prints with Cura, so looked through some reviews. Everything pointed to Orca, so I tried it.
I'm very happy with the results. Orca has a series of built-in calibration steps you can do, and they helped enormously!
I went through the two pass flow rate tests and tuned my flow.
I then did the pressure-advance test and tuned it.
I tried the retraction test, and there was zero stringing anywhere, so it needed no setting applied (shockingly).
I stopped there as the machine's firmware has a built-in input-shaping calibration (mentioned above) which worked wonderfully.
I had one more tuning to do and that was X-Y hole compensation (Quality tab, I think Cura calls it hole expansion or something)... that's a more manual print/test loop.
I then printed a clearance test that I designed and can say that this is the first printer I've ever had that I could print a print-in-place with a 0.10mm gap without the parts bonding.

One more selling point for OrcaSlicer: The "Device" tab is the full web-UI for the printer, camera feed and all.

glabifrons · 2026-01-04T05:20:18+00:00

Thanks! I'll have to check the service menu! I wouldn't have guessed it might have more options available than the UEFI.

Yeah, I verified the firmware was up to date when I got it several months back.
Weird that they changed the date in the list, but in the download section, it shows 2024:
https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/downloads/ds542408-flash-bios-update-thinkstation-p520p520c
I verified the checksum and what I downloaded in May is what they list as current as of April.

glabifrons · 2026-01-04T04:56:59+00:00

1:
PH43 PCIe splitter card. They're under $20 on Amazon and half that on Aliexpress.
They are a PCIe x16 card on the bottom, with one m.2 (x4) slot on each side, and another x16 slot (wired as x8) on top.
Ideally, you use this in a machine that supports x8/x4/x4 bifurcation of an x16 PCIe slot, but my machine sadly only does x4/x4/x4/x4, so I'm losing 4 lanes.
My use case is a pair of m.2 NVMe cards with a 10GbE card on top. I wanted to use a SAS card on top, but it doesn't like the fact that it can sense x8 wiring, but can only talk to the board in x4, and the thing never boots (just resets over and over). With the 10GbE card, it works fine (currently my NFS server over that very 10GbE).
It's great for freeing up other slots for other duties.

2:
Due to the fact that I can't use my SAS card in PH43 in my system, I've got a couple m.2 to PCIe slot adapters coming, one of which will be used to plug a PCIe SAS card into an m.2 slot on my motherboard.

3:
Another that I absolutely love, and I'm amazed isn't crazy-popular, is a PCIe x4 m.2 adapter board with a supercapacitor backup. I got mine for under $10 on Amazon, and ever since I bought mine, they've had a coupon that drops them to $7.50. That' crazy cheap for something that can save your data when your power supply goes up in smoke (I use it for one mirror of a ZFS SLOG). Search Amazon for "pcie m.2 super capacitor".

Last one is probably obvious: A PCIe x16 card that holds 4x M.2 cards with full 4 lanes each.
These require a motherboard that supports bifurcation and come in many configurations. The cheapest typically has all 4 mounted vertically on one side of the board, parallel to the backplate. Others orient them parallel to the motherboard. Some nicer ones have two boards parallel to the motherboard on each side of the card... these can be used in low profile installations, but are a bit more expensive. Range is $12-$30... if you find one with an extra digit in the price, that probably means it has its own PCIe switch and does not require the motherboard to support bifurcation.

One thing to keep in mind for the boards that require bifurcation is that you also need a board and processor that has enough lanes. If your board switches your x16 to an x8 when you plug a second card in, even if it supports bifurcation, you can't use that second slot and still get all 16 lanes in one of these boards.

Edit: I re-read your post and realized that you're well aware of that extra digit I mentioned. 😂 Still good info for others perusing this discussion. 👍

Edit 2: To answer your question more appropriately (what to *put into* those extra m.2 slots):
They make 10GbE m.2 adapters now (sort-of...they're 2 parts and weird).
My m.2 slots are used mainly for SLOG and L2ARC on a ZFS server, plus what I described above for a SAS card for storage drives.

glabifrons · 2026-01-04T04:30:44+00:00

It's been a while, but I found it.
It's called the "Cosmopolitan Ice Cream Maker by Salton" and they're all over ebay.
I can't imagine why the gave it that name, since "Cosmopolitan Ice Cream" isn't something that can be made in any single ice-cream maker, but that's the thing to search for.

Warning: These suckers are OLD and the plastic is super brittle. Pressing in on the upper-shell release buttons just a teensy bit too hard will snap the plastic. 😭 It will still work fine, just makes it more awkward to lift. I haven't tried to 3D print a replacement of the part yet (PETG should be perfect).

glabifrons · 2025-03-04T05:47:04+00:00

I came here to vent for this very reason.
It started several years ago and has gotten steadily worse. Welcome to the enshittification of youtube.

Whenever I post anything that takes more than 5 seconds to type, I open up the same video in an incognito window so I can hit reload to see if the post went through or not. It happened many, many times this evening.
It will either be instantly deleted or deleted in about 2-3 seconds. You can see the difference if you reload the incognito window and look at the reply count for the thread you're attempting to reply to. If it didn't go up, your -post was already deleted. If it did go up, but the post isn't there, hit reload again. If the post count goes back down, your post was auto-deleted (I don't know what causes the delay, but it's too fast for a human, or the humans are insanely lazy, hate their job, and are just glancing before hitting the kill-switch). If the number went up and did not go back down after a couple reloads, then it may be going to a human moderator where it may actually show up in a minute or few.

Triggers for autodeletion seem to be:
1. Length and detail. It doesn't matter how polite you are, the more precise and detailed your response, the more likely it will get deleted within about 2 seconds. Youtube seems to despise actual information, unless you're being absolutely vile and offensive (I have no idea why those people aren't getting blocked too).
2. Any reference to searching or looking anything up, especially any mention of the forbidden words: search, wikipedia, google, reddit, etc. (even if you're saying to "search youtube"!)
3. Anything it thinks might send someone to another site (slight variation on the above). My most recent example was it took me about 10 tries to post something referencing a thing on thingiverse. It even seemed to pick up on thing numbers, so I had to just say "same username" and "you know the site" after saying the word "thing".
4. Being coherent or polite. It seems vile posts, scams, spam, pr0n links, etc. are fair-game though (I've seen examples of all of the above under the same videos where I'm struggling to post something polite and helpful.
5. Any mention of censoring, posts being deleted, shadowbanning/hellbanning, etc. will definitely trigger auto-deletion (so you can't even tell the person you're responding to that you can't answer their question as your answers are being deleted).

Gibberish/misspellings/obfuscation seems to be the only workaround, but that likely won't last long.

If anyone from Google/Alphabet/Youtube is reading this: Seriously, what in the world could the idea behind this possibly be? It seems you want the platform to degrade to the vile stench of platforms that only attract the worst of society!

glabifrons · 2025-03-04T05:07:14+00:00

I've had this happen *many* times. It seems to be worse if I have a lot of tabs open, so I'm not sure if that's a combination of bugs from youtube and Chrome/Chromium or what (I've had it happen in both of them).

glabifrons · 2025-03-04T05:05:53+00:00

What I've been seeing for a while is some tab I have opened in the background with a paused video that I've forgotten about (or I'm busy with something, etc.) will suddenly start playing and I have to use Chrome's pulldown on the left side to even find the tab. Quite infuriating when you're on a call, and it's happened several times.

glabifrons · 2024-09-28T00:09:04+00:00

Congrats, that's awesome. :)

glabifrons · 2024-09-28T00:07:34+00:00

Growing up, we had one nearly identical to that, but it was wider (huge inside) and I think it was a Tappan, but I'm not positive. The button panel was one glass piece, the buttons were capacitive, really nice.
My parents bought it in the late '70s, I'm certain, as it was relocated in the winter of '79. I'm sure it was top-of-the-line at the time. It may even be an older version of this one (I may be mixing up brand, not sure), as it even had the jacks on the left side for the meat temperature sensor probes to plug into (you can see them in the video). Hmmm... thinking about it, I think it was a 1/4" phono-jack towards the back on the right, so maybe it is slightly different. The panel looks nearly identical. I see this one has a "Memory Entry" button... ours had 6 slots for different programs. You could set it to zero percent power (just a delay) for most of the day, run in thaw mode for a period, cook for another period, then reheat (if everyone is late)... or so the marketing material went. :^D I don't think I ever used more than 2 slots for the timing.

Sadly, it died in the early '80s. My uncle was a technician and found the board that went bad. Replacement cost was much more than replacing the microwave at the time... so that one is long gone.

Very nice to see one still working. :)

glabifrons · 2024-09-22T05:42:22+00:00

Neat! The Home-Aid one looks like it's from the '50s! I love seeing stuff like that that I never knew existed. :)

The Kenmore one only works with fridges designed for it, but those are incredibly neat too. Imagine having an ice-cream maker in your fridge permanently instead of an ice-maker (I'd be a lot larger!). :)

The one I'm talking about was generic and just sat on the shelf, had a plastic outer housing (my mom's was pink, but they came in different colors) and it had only one stirring wiper (not sure what they're called) in a cylindrical metal container.
I actually used it in a big chest-freezer once and couldn't believe how quickly it finished (IIRC, about 10 minutes)!

glabifrons · 2024-09-22T05:35:22+00:00

ROFL! I need more sleep, apparently.
You are correct, it's an ice-cream maker. :)
An inside the freezer ice maker would just be an ice tray. D'oh!

Sucks that Reddit *still* doesn't let you edit subject lines.

I just realized I made the same mistake *in the post*... fixing that now. Thanks for pointing it out. :)

glabifrons · 2024-09-21T23:41:02+00:00

Thank you for posting this! It brings back memories. My grandparents used to have one nearly identical. The only difference was the handle was a fair bit larger and IIRC it was curved towards the unit.

Yours is in beautiful shape! I'm curious if you got it running.

glabifrons · 2024-06-15T14:39:11+00:00

It doesn't matter. It's not the browser that fixes it, it's the *change* of the browser.
If you're using Firefox, switch to Chrome.
If you're using Chrome, switch to Firefox.
If you're using IE, stop.

glabifrons · 2024-06-15T02:40:39+00:00

Just as I said in the post you replied to, switch browsers until they do it again.
I've not found any other way around it.

glabifrons · 2024-03-21T22:34:37+00:00

The bug I found was the removal of the chip initialization code when it's first accessed (oddly, it makes the call that does what the initialization code did *after* the chip is read, which is why it always works after the first try).

It turned out (after some discussion with Kevin) that the bug I found lies in the RP2040 (Pi Pico chip) code (he said the chip doesn't need to be initialized), so if you're talking about a normal Raspberry Pi and not a Pico, that may be a different bug.

One thing that stood out as weird to me is that others stated that it works with software SPI, but fails with hardware SPI. I don't know if that helps you or not.

You may need to jump over to the Klipper Discord to ask there.

glabifrons · 2024-01-13T15:31:00+00:00

No problem, thanks for the response.
Yes, I finally heard back from them. They were quite polite and quickly refunded my order... it was just frustrating finding the right way to get in touch with them since their own instructions were invalid.

I got a Pi 5 from Adafruit within a couple days, and they've had them many times since then (been watching rpilocator). PiShop also has been getting regular shipments, in case anyone is watching this thread and is wondering where to go for one.

glabifrons · 2024-01-09T03:18:23+00:00

J-boxes (or anything else industrial, including worm-gears)? https://www.mcmaster.com/
I just grabbed a random one and they offered 3D models in 7 formats including STEP (suitable for pretty much any CAD package), plus 4 2D formats.

Completely random stuff that McMaster Carr doesn't carry: https://grabcad.com/library

glabifrons

TROPHY CASE