Chris Johnson

When I purchased my first 3D printer, it came as a kit. One of the “spider” style.

By this I mean it had three towers with arms that supported a hot-end platform. By moving the base of the arms up and down the towers, the platform would move in 3 space.

It was the fastest type of printer available.

Unfortunately, it was not a good choice. The instructions were not good, and in particular, they got the size of one of the drive wheels wrong.

The printer was designed around 3mm filament at a time when most hotends had moved to 1.75mm. I paid to have a 3D printer dude tune my printer to make it work. It didn’t, but he did upgrade it to 1.75mm filament.

There were three types of filament at the time, PLA, PA, and ABS.

PLA is a starch-based plastic; it has a relatively low melting point but is cheap. It is the standard for most prints.
ABS is the standard plastic you find almost everywhere.
PA is Nylon.

I purchased some ABS and Nylon but never had what I would consider a successful print.

Fast forward to today, and the types of filaments have exploded.

Besides the three listed above, they now have PETG, TPU, PC, ASA, PLA+, PA6, PA12. And many of these are available with CF (carbon fiber) or GF (glass fiber) added.

PETG is stronger than PLA and has a higher melting point. It is commonly used. I use it anywhere I might need something that will withstand a little heat.

TPU is a printable rubber. You can print custom gaskets with it. It is also used for non-slip feet.

PC is polycarbonate; it prints clear and is heat resistant and strong. ASA is a stronger than ABS material.

All of these do a job well. And I’m going a bit bonkers trying to make sure I hit the correct price/performance mark.

The good news, for me, is that I’m starting to come out of the print for the printer and starting to print tools and organizational things for me.

In May of 1963, there were mass protests in Birmingham, AL. Blacks were protesting racist laws, passed by Democrats, and enforced by Democrats.

The laws were bad. The leaders were bad. The cops and other enforcers were bad.

That isn’t to say there wasn’t more than a bit of propaganda going around.

A motel manager was told to get the blacks out of the motel pool. His orders were ignored. The police were being ignored.

The law was bad. The people enforcing it were bad. The hotel manager? We don’t know, but he was painted as bad.

The gallon of acid he poured into that pool would not have done a damn thing to anybody in the pool. Unless it was poured on somebody, it was so diluted b the time it entered the pool that it did not and could not cause harm.

He used fear and ignorance to drive the blacks from his pool, because he was ordered to do so.

Not every person in the South was racist. Not every person was bad. Enough of them were to paint an entire section of our country as evil racists.

64 years later, conservatives are still being painted as racist using these images of Democrats enforcing Democrat-passed laws.

The problem with dealing with people in the spur of the moment is that “bad” or “evil” is not visible in the moment. It takes time.

I still remember the first time I saw the George Floyd video. I was enraged. I was glad I didn’t have to choose between watching a cop kill a black man or shooting the cop and spending the rest of my life in jail.

It turned out that every single thing told to me by that video was a lie. And my country burned.

The evil that is the modern (and historic) Democrat came to the forefront. They held “protests” that turned into riot after riot after riot.

They attacked federal buildings for weeks on end. They took over parts of cities and refused to allow people free travel through their city.

And they lied to us. The entire memo of “mostly peaceful” comes from a reporter telling us that the “protest” was mostly peaceful while the rioters set fires in the background.

When Kyle showed up to defend a commercial property, because the Minneapolis police wouldn’t or couldn’t, he ended up being chased by a convicted felon. When that felon attempted to take Kyle’s rifle from him, Kyle shot him, and made a good communist out of him.

A little later, another man became known as Lefty. He was carrying concealed. He attempted a sneak attack on Kyle, when Kyle pointed his rifle at Lefty, Lefty stopped, then continued his attack, quickly losing the use of his right arm.

Lefty was not legally carrying, by the laws of Minnesota. His permit to carry had expired.

He absolutely had the right to carry. The Second Amendment protects the right of every person to armed self-defense, and more. The law that made it illegal for Lefty to carry was unconstitutional. It might not have been found such, yet, but it is.

I will stand up to anyone to clearly, loudly state that Lefty had the right to carry.

He did not have the right to misuse his gun. When his gun came out of its holster to threaten Kyle, he was no longer on Second Amendment protected grounds.

You have the right to carry. You have the right to defend yourself. You don’t have the right to use your gun for criminal acts.

We need to be aware that rights are not situational. Your right to carry doesn’t end when you go to protest. Your right to carry doesn’t end when you go to a restaurant that serves beer. Your right to carry doesn’t end because somebody else is scared.

The Fifth Amendment does end when a person is accused. That would make it worthless.

Your rights are not situational.

I’ve been told I live in a MAGA bubble. If I wasn’t brainwashed by FauxNews and actually cared about others, I would no longer be a Maggot.

The reality is that I can’t escape their noise and opinions. It is everywhere.

Ally and I noticed a while ago that every cop show on TV talks about “legally registered guns.” Every single one of them. NCIS was horrible about this. Law and Order had the excuse that it was taking place in NYC where all “legal” guns are supposed to be registered.

Though an egregious one popped up recently. The detectives of L&O were investigating a “sniper.” They tracked the gun back to the FFL that sold the gun.

They then accused the FFL of attempting to hide the identity of the purchaser because the signature on the 4473 was illegible. They made a big deal about it.

Every 4473 that I’ve ever filled out requires me to fill out the form with my printed information and the FFL then copies my government ID information (DL) onto the form. If the left didn’t lie they wouldn’t have anything to say.

The Question

What is a trope or common “everybody knows” that you see in movies or shows that is pure left-wing talking points?

I don’t like losing. I hate losing. I don’t want to lose.

In war, if you are not cheating, you’re not playing to win.

The Democrats and the Leftists of my Nation have declared war on me and mine decades ago. They hid it. They disguised it. They cheated.

They knew they were at war, and they were willing to do anything to win.

We saw this in gay marriage. They fought battle after battle, losing every time. They put forth a referendum in California, of all places. And the people of California soundly defeated the drive for gay marriage. The people of California amended their state constitution to define marriage as being between a man and a woman.

The left then found an activist judge to rule that the amended constitution was unconstitutional under the state constitution. What BS.

This led to a Supreme Court decision. And suddenly, gay marriage is the law of the land, against the wishes of the people.

And now I’m told I must accept it forever and ever, amen.

The left took over education, from K-12 to higher education. They won.

They attacked the truth through their constant lies on TV and later “main stream media”. They won.

At every step, they won.

And my side let them. Because we were too polite. Because we took the high road. Because “it was the right thing to do.”

After Sandy Hook, I got in a discussion on Facebook with a liberal. She wanted assault weapons banned. She cared for the little children.

I went on the attack. I threw every argument that had ever been tossed at me, at us. I told her that she hated children because she didn’t want people to defend them. That she wasn’t willing to sacrifice for the children.

For three days I hammered on her. I wasn’t giving an inch until her niece, a good friend, asked me to stop. It turned out that this liberal anti-gun was a teacher who had dedicated her life to children. She couldn’t understand why she was being accused of such heinous thoughts and deeds by a stranger.

I took the high road and stopped. No longer.

We, The People, attempted to stand up to the thieves who stole 2020. The result was that people were thrown in prison, denied their rights, lied about, socially destroyed, and financially destroyed.

To this day, the left lies about what happened. None of the people responsible for that travesty of justice have been punished.

I want them punished!

I don’t want my enemies armed. Not with knowledge, not with training, and certainly not with firearms.

They have exposed themselves to the world as animals. Unwilling to be active members of our societal contract. I want them to suffer.

I also believe in the right to free speech. I believe in the right to armed self-defense. I believe in the rights acknowledged and protected by our constitution.

And it is hard, really hard, to let those evil worms exercise their rights. I want to escalate their sound attacks to an extreme.

I’m reminded of the guy who mounted an aircraft carrier landing light, or something like that, in the back of his pickup truck. When somebody refused to dim their lights, he would light that thing off. Instant blinding of the person who was looking in that general direction.

That’s what I want in the sound world. They’re using a 50W Megaphone, I want to hit them with a 500W megaphone. I’d use a 5000W megaphone, but I’m not sure if I could carry that, even on a vehicle.

I’m of the opinion that ICE should be treating those insurrectionists blocking traffic as speed bumps, and I want it to be legal for you and me to treat them as speed bumps.

They have lost my empathy. They might live next to me, but they are not my neighbors. Neighbors have agreed to a social contract. These monsters have not.

They have no morals. They deserve no mercy from me.

They need to be at the strong receiving end of FO.

The right to self-defense is what keeps us from having mass graves.

I disagree with everything you said. I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Rights exist. We are all born with them. Every person in the world.

We are lucky to live in the United States, where many of those rights are protected by our constitution.

Those are not our Second Amendment rights. Those are our Second Amendment protected rights.

The same is true of all of our rights. Some are explicitly protected through the Bill of Rights, others are implicitly protected through the body of the Constitution and other Amendments.

TCK is wrong. Civil rights do apply to everyone.

My morals are not situational. Ally’s morals are not situational.

TCK’s seem to be situational. Rights for him but not for them.

When Dickwad was accused of sexually molesting the daughters of my best friend, I waited until I had seen enough evidence to know it was true.

When the detective asked me what I thought should happen to him, my answer was simple: After he is found guilty and sentenced, I want him placed in genpop.

Dickwad still had rights. He had a right to a jury of his peers. He had a right to face his accusers. He had the right to not incriminate himself. He had a right not to be tortured.

When he was convicted of the crimes he was accused of, he was sentenced, and his rights were removed from him.

He lost the right to vote, he lost the right to keep and bear arms, and he lost the right to move freely. And I fully expect he will lose his right to life will be removed from him before he gets out of prison.

Now I’m going to put on my administrative hat.

TCK: Feel free to leave. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

If you do stay, drop the insults. Ally put on her administrator hat and gave you the rule.

She told you that “Go fuck yourself.” is unacceptable. I echo that. “Go fuck yourself.” is unacceptable.

Her reply was thoughtful and did not attack you. She expressed her opinion clearly without attacking you.

Your reply again resorted to insults. You can’t point to a single thing in her original article or her reply that even remotely sounds like she’s being an “asshole.” You are wrong. Take a step back and read her article again and her comments without taking it personally.

Civil rights apply to everyone. You might not like it, but they do.

Do you even know what gaslighting means? Ally’s perspective is incredibly valuable to me, and I hope to the blog in general. Because she isn’t a “far-right conservative”. She’s barely right of what center used to be. Her perspective brings how the left perceives things.

She isn’t telling you this is a reality; it is how the left perceives things.

Are their fears irrational? Absolutely. If the Trump administration was disappearing people, like they claim, they wouldn’t know it was happening. If they were out of control, they would be rounding up those insurrectionists and throwing them in the oubliette, never to be seen again. That’s not happening. This means their fears are irrational.

“[Y]ears brutalizing the innocent” doesn’t seem to match with my memory. Those people up in MN didn’t brutalize the innocent. Maybe the Joe Biden puppet masters did, but not those people.

You might think “they” are guilty, you haven’t even presented enough evidence for me to consider them guilty. Regardless, people don’t lose their rights because they say nasty, evil, horrible things. They have to commit an actual crime.

If they haven’t committed a crime but what they did should be a crime, then we need to work to make it a crime.

We don’t get to say, “They committed a moral crime” anymore than they get to say it to us.

The reason they are called “civil rights” has nothing to do with social contracts. They are called that because they are “civil” cases, not criminal cases.

Criminal cases can only be initiated by the state. Civil cases can be initiated by anybody. A boundary dispute between to neighbors is a civil case.

A case about a violation of your Second Amendment protected rights is a civil case.

There is an insurrection taking place in our country. There are clear indications of Command and Control structures and a host of other CIA style “how to” markers.

The left wants highly visible incidents. They want people like Goode and Perti to have their stupidity splashed across the nation’s TVs (and the modern equivalent). It hits at a visceral level when you see somebody being killed.

It doesn’t matter whether it is justified or not; watching somebody being killed causes emotional trauma.

So here is something lighter, from my childhood, maybe yours too:

https://youtu.be/RJREOkcRbv4?t=50

It is ICE cold in my office as I write. Our basement is unheated and has zero insulation, and it leaks like a sieve. This makes the floors cold.

My big goal for the coming spring is to get some insulation into the basement.

But that’s not the type of ICE Cold I’m talking about here.

Up in the insurrectionist state of Minnesota, we had another FAFO moment.

A man who was carrying decided to interject himself with ICE agents. He got physical with them. Five agents were trying to detain or arrest him before he was shot and killed.

He was carrying his firearm in the small of his back. The video I’ve seen shows the gun in his hand before shots were fired.

He’s dead because he FA’d and found out.

Our AG and the director of the FBI both made public statements to the effect that bringing a gun to a protest means you are intending violence and is illegal and can get you shot.

I do not give up my Second Amendment protected rights when I choose to exercise my First Amendment protected rights.

Exercising a right does not even rise to “suspicion.” Merely exercising your rights does not ever give the state the authority to detain you. There must be more.

My friend from Canada was talking about guns and mentioned that carrying them into a bank was illegal. That it was a good way to end up in jail.

He was shocked to learn that I carry every time I enter a bank.

In short, Kash and Pam can go to hell for even thinking that The People must forgo their Second Amendment rights before they can exercise their First Amendment rights.

The “want” of a 3D printer was to be able to make foundry patterns. This is quickly becoming the standard for small run castings. It is much easier and faster than traditional pattern making, and you don’t require the same set of specialized tools.

The downside is that most 3D printers don’t have a large enough print volume of interesting castings, requiring printing in parts and then assembling the parts to create a whole.

This want was not enough. There had to be something that was a reasonable fit with our household. It isn’t like I’m going to be printing dragons and dice and hoping to pay for the hobby with that. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people doing that.

My son just showed me a site where he has purchased D&D figures. He and I will see what we can do for him.

One of my issues is organization. If something has a place, it goes back to that place. Most of the stuff in my life lives on a flat surface. And it is time sorted. The oldest stuff is on the bottom.

I want organizational tools.

Enter two 3D solutions. One is a system of displaying things in an organized way for quick access. The other is the worlds fanciest peg board.

I plan to use GridFinity for most of the “flat” storage areas. That means draw and shelf organizers.

The more extensive system if Multiboard. This is much more complex than GridFinity.

Here’s a simple example of what sorts of things can be done. The eco-system consists of MultiBoard, the pegboard, hooks, and simple shelves. MultiBin, containers to hold things that can be attached to the MultiBoard. With MultiPoint me the connection system.

Take the time to watch the introduction video, get some ideas.

Here are three to think about:

1. Is it an assault with a deadly weapon to use a Super Soaker in -7F tempetures?
2. Should Don Lemon be charged for his participation in the invasion of the church in MN?
3. What is the thing your SO will decide they must have once the snow has started?

My first computer was a Litton Automated Business machine. It used drum memory to store data and had an instruction register and maybe two other registers. I purchased it for $100 my first summer home from college.

It was a remarkable machine. It was fun to work with, but you really couldn’t do much with it. It had dual paper tape readers, a printer, and a paper tape punch. I wrote an inventory control program for my father with just that, in something that looked very much like machine code.

It wasn’t a usable machine for my father.

The computer I told my parents to get was a Macintosh. They just worked out of the box. Plug them in and you had a word processor, a paint program, and I think a spreadsheet. It all just worked.

They got a PC and fought with it for years.

Today I can buy a piece of hardware, load an operating system on it, and have it fully functional as a general purpose computer or acting as an embedded machine in just about an hour.

The biggest time sink is removing and inserting screws to hold everything in place.

3D Printer

10 years ago or so I purchased a 3D printer kit. I’m sure I never got a fully successful printout of that damn thing. I had to do so much to just get it to do something. I spent more time trying to make it work than I did printing. And it was fragile.

Today, I believe that the kit instructions had the count of the number of teeth on one of the drivers wrong. Which meant that cubes were squished.

Today we have Macintosh printers. After 6 months of research, I pulled the trigger and purchased a Bambu Lab’s P2S printer with AMS.

Setup took around 2 hours. Every step was clearly documented. All the tools to do setup were included. Mostly setup consisted of removing packing, tape, and shipping screws.

Thereafter, it was plugging in one cable, 2 tubes, and the power. Turning on the power brought up the screen that forced me through an initial setup process that calibrated everything.

Finally, I pressed a few buttons on the control panel, and it printed a tool.

From there I used the phone app to scan a QR code, which took me to a cloud version of a storage box to print. That’s printing as I write this.

Again, there is no effort on my part to do any of this. It is pick, click, and print.

Calibration

My kit had no bed leveler. That was done by putting a piece of paper on the bed, lowering the nozzle until it just touched, and then clicking the next button to repeat. I think there were 20 or more sample points. And I still don’t know if that was enough.

The automated version required the printer to be working to print a new piece for the printer, which would hold a switch. The switch used a paperclip as a probe. This went much faster, but it still didn’t work.

The motors were noisy, but it was a joy to watch them move the hotend around.

Today’s calibration took around 45 minutes. This included using the built-in lidar to measure the distance to the bed, and then I think it used a pressure sensor to determine when it actually touched the build plate. It took samples every centimeter or so in a grid. That went rapidly.

It then went into a noise tuning calibration. For 20 minutes it ran the hothead around in diagonals, working to find the correct stepper speeds at different head speeds and then tuning them to be quiet.

It worked. These are stepper motors you can’t really hear. It blows my mind.

From there it did vibration calibration. This thing can accelerate so fast that it will cause the printer to move. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

This thing figured out, for this printer, on this surface, just how much the printer reacted to head movement to be able to offset that motion during the deceleration stage.

The first print after calibration took only a few minutes to check calibration before it started printing.

Slicers

To create a 3D print, you start with an idea. You build a 3D model. I use FreeCAD; people use many CAD systems; Fusion 360 is a popular one.

Once you have a “solid”, a completely closed volume, you export that solid as an STL or a STEP file.

An STL is a triangulated file; a STEP file still retains geometry. For example, an STL file will represent a cylinder as a mesh of triangles, while STEP represents the same geometry as a cylinder or as a curved surface; regardless, STEP is the cleaner format.

Now that you have a surface representation of your solid, you import that into a slicer. I’m using OrcaSlicer which is a fork of the Bambu Studios.

This allows some manipulation of stl/STEP objects. The important part is to position the object on the build plate with no overlaps. Once that is done, you can slice the volume.

This is where things have come so far.

The solid is sliced into layers, generally 0.2mm high. The slicer then calculates the path of the print head over the object at the same height. It knows where edges are and uses loops to make solid walls, it adds internal fill to keep the print light yet strong.

3D prints can’t print in thin air, sort of. They can span short distances before the plastic droops too much. To print with an overhang, or to put a top on something, the slicer has the hot end create a raft across infill or across supports. Once that layer is completed, it will put a more finished layer, then an actual finished layer.

The slicers are pure magic. It really is easy.

All the hard work remains back in the CAD package, which is the same package I’m using for all my other engineering builds.

If you are interested in 3D printing, decide why you want it. Then pick any of the plug and play printers out there. I strongly suggest getting one with an enclosure. An enclosure will be needed for certain types of filament.

A good set of starting projects are GridFinity, an organizational system for flat surfaces, including shelves and drawers, and MultiBoard, which is a hyped up pegboard system.