Chris Johnson

Just a short post. I’ve spent the last two days “fixing things.”

Our dishwasher decided to stop emptying the dirty water. I knew exactly what the problem was: the sump/discharge pump had died, again.

Quick order of a $25 part from Amazon, get a hand under the dishwasher, press the release catch, rotate the pump and it comes off in your hand.

Remove the power connector, attach the power connector to new pump, put the pump into place, and rotate until you hear the click. Done.

Except it didn’t resolve the issue.

Call out the repair dude; I didn’t have time to deal with this.

Two weeks later, he’s there. As I suspected, he diagnosed the issue as a dead controller board. This is a $130 part. And it is known to be a quick failure part; if the first dies, the second will die shortly after. Of course, the extra brown on a couple of wires and the look of some ABS connectors made it appear that something had gone overcurrent.

We decided to replace the dishwasher. Communications issues put a delay on that. Then Facebook Marketplace to the rescue. A 300 series Bosch dishwasher for under $200, in good condition.

Which leads us to Saturday, when I’m looking at the new dishwasher and realizing that I don’t see some of the things I expect to see. Turns out that there are missing parts, the power cable for one. Back to Amazon.

That’s tomorrow’s issue: installing the dishwasher, part two.

Meanwhile, I managed to break the 3D printer.

I was changing from ABS to PLA on the external supply. I messed up. Usually the UI just tells you what to do. But I haven’t read the online manual, so there are things I don’t get, and I don’t know I don’t know.

The sequence I had been using, which always worked before, was to unload the old filament, load the new filament, tell the printer the type and color of the newly loaded filament.

This is the wrong sequence.

You first unload the old filament. You then tell the printer the new filament type and color. Then you load the new filament.

When you do it in this order, the printer helpfully tells you, “Don’t push that PLA into the chamber/hotend that is too hot! It will melt and jam things.”

I didn’t get that warning. I pushed the PLA into the extruder; I kept feeding during the “grab filament” stage. And I created a blob after the drive wheels and before the cold end of the nozzle. It couldn’t go forward. The printer then tried to retract the filament. This deformed the filament going the other direction. Locking the end of the filament in the extruder drive.

This was a 15 minute fix, if I had a clue. Instead it took 2 plus hours. But it is fixed and I know more now.

I just have to keep fixing.

Watching court cases can be interesting. Watching the legal system can be interesting. Watching the system is crucial.

Back in 2022 there was the case of New York Pistol and Rifle Association v. The City of New York. This question in this case involved the right of the people of NYC to take their permitted firearms out of the city.

As the laws were at the start of the court case, a person had to get a permit to possess a firearm. They were then given permission to have that firearm on their premises, to transport it in a disabled manner to one of seven gun ranges in NYC, where they could shoot.

They were not allowed to take the gun out of the city to other ranges nor to competitions.

The plaintiffs, the good guys, argued that they owned property outside of NYC where they wanted to possess their firearms. The city and state argued that if they wanted a gun in those places, they should buy a second gun and store it in that other place, leaving it unattended when they were in the city.

The city and state of New York argued this case vigorously through the district and Second Circuit Court of Appeals. All the inferior courts found that this infringement was consistent with the Second Amendment and Heller.

When the Supreme Court granted cert, the city and state backpedaled so fast that it made Road Runner cartoons look slow in comparison. The city changed the regulation. The state passed a law saying that the city law was illegal, and the lawyers argued that the case was moot.

The Supreme Court agreed that the case was mooted, and the case was closed.

We thought this would be the end of Second Amendment cases in the Supreme Court that year, but the court choose to hear Bruen and we got one of the best opinions on the Second Amendment in years.

Watching The Case

I was watching this case. When it was mooted, I was concerned. When Bruen was decided, I was through the roof with happiness, tempered by my knowledge that there were going to be Bruen tantrum response laws.

What I didn’t realize at first was that this was a stepping stone.

We don’t get back our rights instantly. It is a war. A series of battles where we win, over and over again, only to face another battle.

Bruen is just about the right to carry outside our homes without being subjected to subjective licensing regimes.

Until you realize that it is that stepping stone.

When the Fourth Circuit heard oral arguments on Bianchi shortly after Bruen issued, I was sure we were going to see a rapid advancement of good Second Amendment Case law.

That case was heard and disappeared. The next case was Antonyuk v. Hochul. We had wins at the district level, and it looked like we were going to get wins at the appeals level. But we didn’t.

Watching cases was a disappointment. We were stuck in the same court of bad opinions as we were before Bruen. It didn’t seem like anything had really changed.

Watching the Legal System

From this I started to notice patterns. When Chicago’s infringements, oops, Illinois’s infringements were heard by the Seventh Circuit Court, a name popped up. Easterbrook. Why was his name familiar? Because he was the judge who authored the Seventh Circuit Court’s opinion in McDonald where he found that the Second Amendment didn’t apply to the people of Illinois, “Because the Supreme Court has never said that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Second Amendment.”

This case also made it to the Supreme Court, where The Court proceeded to say, “The Second Amendment damn well does apply to the states, you moron.”

This is a web of legal decisions. Each layered on the last, making a stronger and stronger platform for The People to exercise their rights.

What I started to see is that there is a game being played by the infringing states. It wasn’t about winning; it was about not losing.

If a Second Amendment case makes it to this Supreme Court, The People will win. The three DEI hires on the Court are the wise Latino, Obama’s in-house lawyer, and “What’s a woman?” Jackson will not be able to convince any of the originalists to violate their morals or the law.

But what if we were to lose Thomas? If Hillary or Kamala were able to appoint another Jackson, the battle would be much more difficult.

The infringers aren’t interested in winning right now; they just don’t want to lose. They are waiting for the makeup of the Supreme Court to change to favor them instead of The People.

This is how come we saw Duncan GVRed to the Ninth Circuit Court, where they sent it back down to the District Court, where the District Court found that it was just as unconstitutional under Bruen as it was before Bruen.

Which means that Duncan still has not been decided. It is still up in the air with millions of dollars spent.

So, the infringers want to keep these cases out of the Supreme Court. One of the ways they do this is by arguing the ripeness of a case.

The gist of “ripeness” is that any controversy in law across this nation will have suits brought in different circuits. Until the circuit courts have had a chance to weigh in, the case is not ripe for the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court needs to know the opinions of the inferior courts to make good judgments.

The counter to this is when there is a circuit split.

A circuit split happens when two or more circuits come to different opinions on the same controversy. If circuit A says that assault weapon bans are constitutional and circuit B says that they aren’t, that’s a split.

In the First Circuit, they have found that MA’s infringements are consistent with the Second Amendment. So having a shell casing in MA without having the proper license/permit/permission is a felony, but cross over to NH and it isn’t an issue.

Two states with two different sets of laws, both “constitutional” according to the First Circuit, and no other circuit disagrees.

We are much more likely to see the Supreme Court take a case if there is a circuit split.

Watching the System

New Jersey had that tantrum after Bruen and decided to make as much of New Jersey a “sensitive” place, gun-free zones. It was very egregious.

The district court enjoined the laws. The administrative panel of the Third Circuit stayed most of the restraining order. When the case was heard by the merits panel, two of the three found that New Jersey’s laws were consistent with the Second Amendment and let the laws stand.

But the system worked. Trump managed to get Judge Mascott appointed to the Third Circuit. The day the case was to be heard by the en banc Third Circuit court, Mascott was sworn in at the Supreme Court, and then was in court to sit with the en banc panel.

We will win that case. And with that win, there will be a circuit split.

The system, appointing originalists to fill as many judicial positions as possible, is going to give us a win. And that win will mean that there will be bigger, nationwide wins.

But there’s more!

The Trump and Bondi DOJ seems to be for The People one day, and then argues for infringements the next day. It is enough to give a grown man whiplash.

For example, the DOJ is arguing that the registration requirements of the NFA should still apply, even if the tax is zero.

We all know this is BS. Trump ordered his DOJ to become defenders of the Second Amendment; why would they argue for the NFA? That’s just stupid.

Except it isn’t.

Trump ordered the DOJ to defend the Second Amendment. If Newsom were to become president, he is just as likely to order his DOJ to go back to infringing.

What the pen can do, the pen can undo.

On the other hand, if the Supreme Court were to rule that without the tax requirement, there is no hook for Congress to regulate suppressors and SBR, that is much more concrete.

It is a system. You need to look at all the moving parts to see just how complicated it actually is. You can’t just take a single snapshot and claim that is representative of the system. You have to look from many different angles.

Ally sent me a meme that said that Trump is asking for term limits. She suggested that our opinion on term limits be the question of the week.

I disagree, I don’t know anybody on the right that doesn’t want term limits. How long have some of those swamp creatures been in office?

Senator Sanders has been in public office his entire life. He’s become rich as a “public servant” with multiple million-plus dollar homes.

Term limits are just a good idea.

The Lead

My friend has children. His firearms are locked in expensive safes. He doesn’t ever leave a firearm where a child or stranger could easily access it.

While my children were younger, I kept my firearms under lock and key. If my gun wasn’t on me, it was locked up.

Today I have multiple display cabinets, like my Uncle Alan had when I was a kid. I have display cases and display racks. And of course I still have my safes.

The Question

What criteria do you use when deciding how to store your firearms and ammunition?

I have been doing computer modeling of some sort since around 1989. I’m not great at it; my task was generally making software that real modelers would use.

The software I worked on was BRL-CAD. BRL-CAD is a true solid modeling system. It is based on Combinatorial Solid Geometry (CSG). That is to say, you create solids and then use Boolean logic to get the shape you want.

What this means, in practical terms, is that you represent a sphere with a vector and a scalar. The first is the point in 3 space where the center of the sphere is located, and the other is the radius of the sphere.

The way we viewed the geometry was wireframe for modeling and then ray tracing for 3D rendering.

And we did astonishing things with this software. The visuals were often not the point of the model; often it was analysis of the model. For example, we had code that could be used to analyze the penetration mechanics of one solid impacting another solid, a target.

When we needed to move to the modern graphics processors, we needed a method of converting our solid models into triangles. We used non-manifold geometry instead of the industry standard of winged edges, thanks to some cutting edge research out of Australia.

That’s just backstory; sorry for the interruption.

Here is a case I’m designing for a Banana Pi BPI-M2 board that is running my NTP service.

This doesn’t have any of the cutouts required for the ports, but it is a good generic case. I’ll be adding design parameters for putting in posts for the board and other needed options for the case.

The basic design is parameterized. Which is to say, I have a spreadsheet that has values for width, length, height, shell thickness, and clearances.

The wedges for the snap fit are also derived from those values. It looks good.

Until I started to do the math.

I know what an inch is. I even have a good idea of what a 1/16th of an inch is. And because I’ve been playing with it, I know that 0.062 inches is close to 1/16th of an inch.

I have a feel for all of that.

What is a millimeter, though?

Well, that turns out to be 0.039 inches. Closer to 1/32nd than to 1/16. That’s small.

0.5 mm is 0.0196 inches. This is even smaller. While I strive to hit my tolerances within a few thousandths, and when I’m dialing something in, I’ll always get to a thousandth or less, those are small numbers.

And here is where I started to realize that I was making design mistakes. I had set my shell thickness to 1.5 mm with a clearance of 0.5 mm.

I got the 0.5 mm clearance from several sources talking about 3D printing snap-together cases. When I set the lip to be half the shell thickness, I got a 0.75 mm wide lip. That looked great. Then I remembered the clearance requirements and added allowance for that.

This meant that my lip was only 0.25 mm thick, or 0.0098 inches. That’s not a feature; that’s a burr.

In addition, the nozzle I’ll be using is 0.4 mm in diameter. The smallest feature I can print will be 0.4 mm or larger. I would have to use a different nozzle to get that level of detail.

The image you see above had the shell thickness set to 3 mm. I still want to do the lip, I’ll do a few test prints to dial it in.

There is this place where the mathematically perfect collides with physics, which collides with engineering, which is firmly entrenched in the real world.

The real world always wins.

One of the most powerful things about FreeCAD is that it is a fully scriptable CAD modeling system. This means you can write python scripts to do things.

They call them macros.

Which means they have plugins that do remarkable things. Just wonderful things.

The one I recently started using is the Gridfinity addon. Click the add button, and it will give you a bin. You can click some parameters to get exactly the shape you want.

If all you want is a bin, this works perfectly.

I want to make custom shadow cutouts in bins for some of my tools.

What I can’t do is select the face of the Bin and make direct modifications to it.

More learning to do.

For now, it is getting easier to get things done the way I want to.

When I heard this song on ,Fallout it struck a chord with me. My country is worth fighting for.

The very first thing you need to do when choosing a printer is know what you want to print.

I can’t stress this enough. Sure you can go buy a $2000 11×17 color laser printer. But are you going to print 11×17? Do you need full photographic quality prints?

If what you are doing is printing your tax forms, then a simple $200-$300 black & white printer will do just fine.

The same is true for 3D printers. What do you want to print?

For me there was the “true” driving want, which wasn’t enough to justify a printer. I wanted to be able to print foundry patterns.

With enough research I found that organizational capabilities was high on my list of to-dos that has never gotten done.

To that end I picked MultiBoard as the ultimate pegboard and Gridfinity as my “flat surface” organizer.

Given these three drivers, I could start to list what I required in a printer.

I have tried printing foundry patterns in the past. It didn’t work. Today it should work better.

Most, if not all, of the MultiBoard and Gridfinity can be printed in the cheapest, easiest filament, PLA.

PLA requires a build plate that will support 55°C and a nozzle that supports 220°C. This is every printer out there.

If you need something a bit stronger, PETG is the go-to today. It requires a 70°C build plate and a 230 °C nozzle. Still well within the reach of most 3D printers.

Everything else requires more series printers. ABS, ASA, PA, and PC all require an enclosure. Without an enclosure, your prints will fail. The print will warp, and you will have issues with bed adhesion.

If you need to print something that will be exposed to the elements or that needs to be stronger, you need to go with one of the stronger plastics.

Which leads to the next class of filaments, those with additives. Carbon fiber and glass fiber are two of the common additives.

These fibers will eat your equipment. It will wear your PTFE tubes, but worse, it will eat your extruder and nozzle. You need hardened steel extruder driver gears and nozzle. You just have to plan on replacing the PTFE tubes as they wear. This should already be on your to-do list.

Some new printers come with multiple hotends so you can switch filaments while printing, quickly and easily.

For me, all of this took me to an 3D printer in an enclosure with a series build volume. The build volume I was looking for was 250x250x250 mm.

Because I knew I was going to be printing some CF or GF filament, I knew I wanted to upgrade my hotend to hardened steel.

Finally, I wanted to be able to change the nozzle without messing with cables, wires, or complex procedures.

After doing some back-of-the-envelope research, I started looking for a low cost printer that met my needs.

The printer names that popped up were Elegoo, Flashforge, Creality, and Bambu Lab.

I had never heard of Elegoo or Flashforge, but I had heard of both Creality and Bambu Lab.

The printer I was looking into was a Creality printer, but the Bambu Lab kept showing up with positive reviews. Their P1S met my needs except for the hardened nozzle, but that was an “easy” upgrade. The thing that was blocking me from pulling the trigger was that replacing the nozzle required changing out electronics. Something I did not want.

And then I stumbled on Bambu Lab P2S. This was released in late 2025. The reviews were all positive, but more than that, the reviewers were surprised at the types of improvements.

The P2S came with a hardened extruder and a hardened nozzle. They had also ditched the old hotend and gone with the hotend from one of their higher-end printers. They went with the H2D hotend.

This hotend has a quick replace system for the nozzle. You no longer need to replace electronics or mess with cables; you remove a silicon boot from the nozzle, release two spring clips with your fingers, remove the old nozzle, put the new nozzle in, close the clips, put the boot back on, tell the printer what nozzle you have installed.

I’ve done this twice. The first time took about 5 minutes, the second time about 30 seconds.

This left the ecosystem.

Bambu Lab is a closed ecosystem. They recently updated all their printers. With this update, 3rd party software tools lost the ability to control the printer. You could still move files to and from the printer, but you couldn’t initiate a print.

I had also read that Bambu Lab was using AI to evaluate the things being printed and would refuse to print some models from the cloud.

You could move the files by USB drive, but that gets painful.

They did have a LAN-only mode. That is what I am currently using. In LAN only mode you get full control of your printer. Your printer no longer talks to the Cloud. Your printer is yours.

It also turns out that the OrcaSlicer, which is a fork of the Bambu Studio slicer just works in LAN-only mode.

In addition, the price for the printer and the Automatic Material System (AMS) was less that the Creality printer I was looking for.

Conclusions

Am I happy with my purchase? Yes.

Is there anything I regret? Yes, I didn’t get enough filament out of the gate. I’ve gone through about 10 pounds of filament so far, and I’m not slowing down.

I don’t like finding out that I need a seperate dryer. And the amount of effort it takes to get dry filament.

I don’t like that I can’t directly move files from the Bambu Cloud to my printer; I have to move it through OrcaSlicer.

Would I do it again? Yes. Would I get a different printer? No.

My printer has been printing nearly non-stop since I got it. There were a couple of days when it was busy drying filament and not printing.

They offer the A1 combo at $399. That is the A1 and the AMS light. The AMS light handles four spools and you can have upto four AMS connected to your printer.

They also have the A1-Mini which comes in at $219 but only has a 180x180x180 build volume.

Please remember that I’m a Unix/Linux geek with to much experience in too many fields. What works for me might not work for you. Do your own research, but remember the first rule, have a reason you are going to spend some money. If you aren’t sure, look for a used A1 or A1-Mini or the most popular 3D printer, the Creality Ender 3.

I went with a Bambu Lab P2S printer. It is an enclosed printer; it has excellent support and ecosystem. And it has strong vertical integration.

In order to 3D print something, you need the printer, a build plate, filament, a model, and a slicer.

The build plate is a surface that the filament will adhere to when you want it to and release your printed part when you want it to release.

Filament is a thermoset plastic. I.e., a plastic that melts when heated and can be reshaped and then will hold that new shape after it cools.

The model is a digital 3D solid. It is normally generated with a CAD package.

The slicer take the 3D solid and slices it into layers, then creates a sequence of g-code instructions to recreate that solid in plastic.

The First Print

To start with, I purchased filament from Bambu Lab to use on my printer. Their filament spools come with RFID tags. When you put the spool in the AMS, it will read the RFID, which tells the AMS what type of filament it is and what color. It also says it is Bambu Lab filament, but nobody else has permission (cryptographic) to create RFID tags that the printer/AMS will read.

I selected a useful “print” from the prints that are preloaded in the printer. Then I pressed “go”.
It printed exactly what I wanted, and it has been in use ever since.

The Second Print

It is nice to have models preloaded to print, but that would get boring rapidly. The next step was to use their phone app to print something.

This consisted of starting their app, pointing my phone camera at a QR code on a box. That QR took me to a model in the Bambu Lab cloud. I clicked the print button and a short time later I had a 3D version of that print.

There were more things I printed this way, but it was time to move up.

The slicer

The approved software is Bambu Studio. Which is an Apple or Windows program, no Linux version. I choose to go with OrcaSlicer because it is well respected and integrates nicely with Bambu Lab printers.

Using the slicer, I was able to download models from other sites, outside of the Bambu Lab cloud, slice them, and then send them to the printer. I could then use the Bambu App to start the print, or print directly from the printer control panel.

Over time, I’ve moved away from the Bambu Lab Cloud. I’m doing everything locally now. I still use their cloud to find models ready to print, but that is only because it is easy. I can use their phone app, search for a model, tag it, then download and print it later.

ReMix

My first major print was a riser for the AMS. This was printed in four large parts and a set of TPU gaskets. Yes, I can print custom gaskets.

The riser holds two drawers. I printed those drawers with a Gridfinity base.

All is good so far. I then print a deburring tool Gridfinity bin. It should fit perfectly. It does, except it is too tall. I can’t close the drawer.

This lead to me doing my first remix. I pulled the STL into FreeCAD, then created a sold cube the right size. Intersected the two solids and ended up with a shortened version.

This worked. My deburring tool now fits perfectly in my Gridfinity drawer.

This type of remix is simple. More complex remixes take more time. I’m not good at it yet because it requires me to create a solid from an STL or STEP file.

My First Model

I wanted a Gridfinity box to hold my ultra-precision torque screwdriver. I did all the right things, except I did a shit job of my B-splines. I also took a bad picture. I was too close, so lines that should have been straight were not.

Regardless, I printed it. What came out fit the Gridfinity base. The bin was short enough that the drawer would close.

The issue? The finger holes to lift the tool out were way too small. I’ve learned that I need between 20 mm and 30 mm to bake it easy to grip.

I have a second attempt ready to go, but I haven’t printed it yet. It was cool to see. It is a disappointment for it to not work.

My Latest Model

To control the path of filament, 3D printers use lots of PTFE tubing. This is 4 mm OD and about 2 mm ID pneumatic tubing. These fit into PTFE couplers. One of the coupler/connectors I’m using is a PC4-M10. This has a push connector on one side and is threaded M10 on the other.

I’m using a printed replacement cap for a cereal container. A 4L cereal container will hold a 1 KG spool on rollers with space for a hygrometer and desiccant. With a hole in the container, you can feed your filament out and directly to your printer without ever exposing your filament to the moisture in the air.

One method is to drill a 10 mm hole in the side of the container and use a PC4-M10 screwed into the side. A better method is to put a M10 flanged nut on the backside.

I would rather not drill holes, so I went with the replacement cap with a socket for the PC4-M10.

The model prints the cap, a sealing plug, a threaded and knurled screw-on cap. The cap proper has an inset threaded boss for the knurled cap to screw onto to seal the container.

That boss holds a PC4-M10. The model also contains a printed nut for the PC5-M10. Now here is my issue: the person that printed this seems to have found PC4-M10 with M10x1.5 threads. The PC4-M10 I have is measured with M10x1.0 threads.

I went into FreeCAD, I created a solid with a flange, 17mm hex nut, and a proper M10x1.0 threaded hole.

And it worked. Those nuts are now in use.

I am that much closer to being able to print my patterns for castings.

It has been a learning week for me. I’ve actually gotten to the point where I’m printing things for me rather than for the printer and the printing process.

Every part of the process is so much better than it was the last time I was attempting 3D prints. I have one confirmed model that is a failure. I’ll work with the least failed print to get the tool I need.

The two biggest issues in 3D printing today are bed adhesion and bad filament. Now bad filament isn’t always bad, sometimes it is just that it has absorbed too much water from the air.

There is a relatively simple fix for that: dry your filament.

My printer came with an AMS (automatic material system). It consists of a chamber that holds four spools of filament; each spool has its extruder/feeder. The printer controls the AMS. When the printer wants a particular filament, it unloads the current filament, then it tells the feed motor to push the filament down a sequence of PTFE tubes and Y connectors until the filament is at the extruder proper.

The printer then pushes out the old plastic from the hot end with the new filament, leaving the nozzle loaded with the new filament. It is cool to watch.

The AMS is designed for four small packages of silica desiccant. One of the first things I printed was a set of boxes to hold more desiccant. The AMS now has about between 10 and 20 times as much desiccant as it started with.

The AMS is sealed, has circulating fans and a heater. This means it can be used to dry filament as well as feed it.

There is one small issue: you can’t print while it is drying. You have to have a separate power supply for the AMS to dry while printing.

Which takes me to my “quick” fix, a SunLu S1 Plus filament dryer. This holds one spool of filament, it can run at up to 55°C, and it does a good job of PLA, PETG, and one or two other filaments.

Using it I have been able to rescue some 10 year old PLA that was stored open. It has all just printed, after it was dryed.

Now the fix to this temperature issue is to use a “blast oven”. A blast oven means an oven that can maintain a constant temperature for an extended period of time while air is forced around the filament.

I don’t have a blast oven. What I do have is a printer that can maintain a constant temperature but doesn’t have a fan.

The manufacturer recommends printing a cover in Polycarbonate (PC). But PC is extremely hygroscopic. Straight from the package, it has to be dried at 90°C. Which my SunLU can’t do.

If I had a PC drying cover, I could dry the PC in the printer. All I need is some dry PC but what I have is wet PC.

And this issue exists for every filament I have. So I’m doing a bootstrap.

I did a printer bed drying of some ASA. This took around 12 hours. I used a cardboard box, as recommended. To make a fake cover.

With the ASA dry enough to print, I’m printing a blast oven. This is a two part filament dryer that uses the printer bed for the heat source and a carefully designed drying chamber with forced air.

Now all I have to do is hope that part two prints successfully tonight.

What is the stupidest thing you’ve heard somebody say in the last two weeks?