No crimes should be thought crimes. All crimes should be action crimes. There can be no middle ground as long as freedom of expression exists.

Doing Nazi shit should get you locked up (or beaten up, or whatever). Talking about it should just get you ridiculed by everybody.

Ah, yes. Thoughtcrime and suppression of freedom of speech are totally okay as long as it’s our side doing it. No, no, no, see, when we do it it’s totally different from when other people do it!

The problem is, everyone has this fantasy storyboard in their heads of the cops showing up going door-to-door with their MP5s and riot shields in a nice neat line loudly announcing their intentions. That is absolutely not how gun confiscation is going to work.

Instead, once they’ve declared that trans people or Democrats or whoever else are now blanket banned from owning guns, any time you interact with the police, let’s just say during a (probably spurious) traffic stop, your name will come up on their little computer as a “person prohibited” and they’ll put you in handcuffs and stuff you in the back of a police car right then. And then go break into your house and toss it looking for guns when you’re not there to stop them. There will be no fight. You’ll already be under arrest for something else. They’ll find (or plant) whatever they want, and charge you with an additional nine hundred crimes that are all rewordings of the same thing, and put you in jail. When they come up to you they’re not going to be talking about guns, they’re going to start off with some low-grade bullshit you think you can talk yourself out of but use that as a pretext to lock you up for your guns.

There will be no headlines of jack booted thugs going around systematically kicking in innocent people’s doors and garnering a bunch of negative press for themselves that people can rally themselves around. There will be individual local little news articles, one at a time, all along the lines of “Arsenal Of Illegal Weapons Found in [town name] Man’s Home/Car By Brave Policemen After Conducting Traffic Stop, One Of Which Was a High Capacity Black Semiautomatic AR Glock Assault Child-Shooter,” with an article underneath carefully spin-doctored to slander the individual in question as a mentally unstable transgendered pot smoking child grooming terrorist. They’ll do this one at a time, forever, even long after they’ve gotten everyone the think they wanted to get.

The only defense against that is to assume that any time a cop looks in your direction you need to lock and load right then and there and initiate a fight for your life. Even if you win, you’ll automatically be the bad guy.

Are you ready for that?

Is anyone ready for that?

Well, good news!

The raid was authorized by a judge-issued search warrant following a monthslong investigation of the facility, Schrank said. The investigation of the worksite remains active, he added, but no charges of wrongdoing have been filed.

…Oh.

Standing right here. I’d also like to know what part of due process this is, exactly.

And also weed out models that are clearly impossible to print.

FWIW I always make my headline image a printed instance of whatever it is. I figure nobody’s interested in anything else.

Here’s another vote for the X-Max 3. Mine has been quite solid.

If anyone is interested in multi color support, though, it seems that the Qidi “Box” filament changer deal will never be made compatible with the Max series, and will only work with the new/current Plus 4. There is at least one third party solution for this in the CoPrint ChromaSet thingy, but this engenders some pretty significant compromises and also locks you into using their nozzles, in addition to reducing the print volume significantly which kind of defeats the purpose of the X-Max 3.

If you have any AMS-ish aspirations, the X-Plus 3 and X-Max 3 are probably out of the running.

It’s a cost thing. It’s cheaper to get a shitty commodity touch screen from Alibaba and slap it in a cheap bezel, hook it up to a potato, and then just outsource the design and functionality to the code team in India. It’s more expensive to actually do the industrial design to fit physical buttons and dials and source all the components required for the same. Engineers are obsessed with screens because their bosses are obsessed with cost.

It’s the consumers, not the engineers, who go all starry-eyed and get so easily wowed over a crappy $12 touch panel with shit for pixel density and fuck-all for viewing angles, because they’re the ones who have been bamboozled into believing this is all “futuristic.” Most people aren’t tech savvy enough to realize they’re being sold cheap bullshit at a premium.

Well, we’ve already had Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, arguably Al Franken (he was on SNL), not to mention the Cheeto Bandito. Clint Eastwood and even Jerry goddamned Springer both made it as far as mayor. There are probably tons of others I’m forgetting.

So that ship has likely sailed, I’m sorry to say. Too late; we’re already stupid.

All of this represents a deeply flawed understanding of how such “tracing” works. In order for this to accomplish anything you have to have both the printed gun part and the printer that made it already in your forensics lab, which means whoever you’re trying to hassle has already been caught. This might help secure a conviction after the fact by being able to conclude that, yes, part A was probably printed on printer B. It absolutely will not allow any random beat cop to grab any random printed gun off the street and be able to proclaim, “Ah, yes. This was printed by Bob Smith at 123 Maple Street,” or whatever hyperbolic fantasy these authoritarian types are always wishing for.

The risk here is cocksure but incompetent investigators inevitably generating a shitton of false positives and charging/convicting the wrong people just because they happen to own a 3D printer, and judges and juries believing them. This kind of thing already happens in established fields of forensics all time and if they couch everything in enough authoritative sounding language nobody who doesn’t already know a whole bunch about the topic is going to be able to call them out on it.

Given all you’ve tried I can only conjecture that this may be a print temperature issue, especially since you already tried adhesive. What material are you printing, and at what temperatures for nozzle and bed?

You may also find that your printer’s sensors are not reporting temperature accurately. Mine sure isn’t and never has, at least on the bed, and it consistently reads about 5 degrees high versus reality if you poke the surface with an external temperature probe. This isn’t a big deal only so long as you know to compensate for it. The thermal conductivity of whatever your print bed material is may also force you to compensate, i.e. a glass plate will not perform the same as a steel one and may require a boost of a few degrees and/or allowing it to cook longer during the preheating phase before you start your print.

I print on a sheet of cheap Kapton tape with a later of even cheaper hairspray on it (Aqua Net, if you must know), “65” °C bed temp for PLA (60 in reality) with a first layer temp of 215 for regular PLA, and 210 for “rapid” PLA blends. My sharp corners stay put.

I much prefer printing mechanical things, and stuff that does stuff (or fixes stuff) is where it’s at for me. For me to print a static model it has to either be sufficiently hilarious or fit with some inside joke in my household (penguins and ducks feature prominently) or I ain’t doing it.

A word to the wise for anyone printing static models or figurines for your kids, or whatever. Print these in TPU instead of PLA. TPU is functionally indestructible except via heat, can’t shatter, won’t hurt as much if you step on it in the dark, and its moderate amount of squishiness means that it’s significantly less likely to deal damage when younger brothers throw it at older sisters.

I can tell you for sure they probably don’t mean this, but it was still my first thought.

I’m assuming glass printer beds are supposed to be tempered, and just an FYI for you or anyone else attempting the hardware store or score-it-yourself method, the glass you wind up with will not be tempered and will also have exceedingly sharp edges and corners. If you have access to a belt sander with a suitably fine belt you can at least round off the sharp bits.

Untempered glass probably won’t deal with thermal loading very well, either. It might work, and it’ll be cheap, but prepare for disappointment.

Slotted is the way to go. I’ve messed with a lot of drive types on 3D printed screws and I always come back to slotted, because it’s the most resistant to being reamed out. Phillips, Torx, Roberson (square), and especially Allen (hex) really don’t work very well when printed in plastic.

melt ceramic

If you’re melting crockery in your microwave, I assure you whatever it is you’re using is not ceramic. Even the earthenware stuff that cheap coffee mugs are made out of has to be heated to upwards of 1000° C just as part of its hardening process, never mind melting.

You can absolutely get silica gel beads hot enough in a microwave to melt and deform plastic containers, though, including those faux stoneware textured ones. Beware if what you have is not actually Pyrex or ceramic.

I cook the shit out of my silica gel beads in the microwave in an old ceramic pie dish I have no other use for. There isn’t a mark on it. Although I will say, you probably want to microwave your beads gently anyway because at high power levels the moisture flash boils out of them fast enough to cause them to split and shatter, or occasionally leap out of the dish like popcorn.

I don’t print TPU on a textured bed. I use the flat side of my build plate, which I also have coated with a giant sheet of Kapton/polyamide tape. Peeling the completed parts off of the smooth surface has never been an issue.

A word to the wise: Always run with a sheet of polyamide tape if you have a flat build plate. This will go a long way towards protecting the finish and flatness of your plate, and I have definitely saved myself a couple of times when having a Z offset that was too low and thusly crashing the nozzle only into the tape and not the surface of the expensive plate itself. You can apply adhesive and clean the tape’s surface just the same as the PEI surface of your plate, but once it gets worn out or chewed up or otherwise no longer produces parts with a pretty underside, you can just peel it off and reapply. If you’ve already fucked up the surface on your plate you can also paper over this with a layer of tape which will smooth out small scratches, pock marks, and other imperfections.

And if you really need to employ the nuclear option to get a stuck part off of your bed (i.e. if you’ve printed something with a sticky filament such as TPU or PETG and happened to have your Z offset way too low) you can peel the tape off along with the part. The tape is unlikely to survive this process, but a pack of 12 sheets is only $20 or so.

That is a mighty chunky thread!

I can tell you from experience that the strength of your part is not likely to be due to the design or pitch of the threads but rather down to the layer adhesion strength of your print and whatever material you’re using. Even a dinky 1.0mm thread pitch is perfectly capable of ripping the layer lines of a print apart, and your point of failure will be the layer immediately below where your countersunk head contacts the base of your nut and/or part it’s screwed into, the exact moment you overtorque it.

I have a bit of experience with this sort of thing. Actually, these days, probably rather a lot.

Your thread creation approach is similar to mine but I prefer to use an additive helix on the male thread, and then a matching subtractive one on the nut or female side. I find this makes it a little easier to tune for good engagement. If you need to make multiples in a single assembly you can draft clone your sketches to make them all the same. Change one, change them all. You can just use triangles to create both the male and female helices, unless you want to make the tips of the threads flat in which case you can draw a trapezoid.

There are various threaded fastener workbenches and plugins available, as others have mentioned, but I prefer to do things the hard way since I came up using FreeCAD in not only the pre-1.0 era, but even pre-0.21 back when the hard way was the only way to do anything and there was no path forward except to Git Gud. If you have specific design parameters in mind I find that building screws manually provides much more flexibility. That, and not having your file explode in your face if you happen to open it on a machine that doesn’t have your full selection of plugins installed is always nice.

They even made us memorize this one in grade school:

1. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Note that this says nothing about having to be a citizen for this to apply to you, either. And while we’re at it, see also this.

That’s remotely possible, and I would be inclined to agree if the circumstances around this weren’t so fishy to begin with.

E.g. why is the police report heavily redacted? Why has the suspect not been named? This is highly unusual, and suggests there’s something more going on. I’d doubt very highly the grand jury were given the full picture.

It’s pretty much a done deal that we’ll never know more. Someone is making an effort to bury this.