Mechanismatic

Prusa published an article about it: https://help.prusa3d.com/article/watertight-prints_112324

Or Linda Hamilton’s in Terminator 2, except literally.

It’s a partnership and the INDX isn’t a separate printer, just a new extruder, so it’s not like Prusa has no involvement. I would say “completely” is inaccurate here. If it were solely the effort of INDX, they wouldn’t need to partner with Prusa. There are other third parties that release mods for printers that aren’t collaborations with the original manufacturer.

If Prusa hired the INDX engineers from BondTech instead of partnering, would you still consider it completely separate? A company is just composed of current employees. At what point is it Theseus’ ship of development?

And that’s not even considering the CORE One, the recent CORE One+ update, the CORE One L announcement, the OpenPrintTag, et al. They’ve been announcing more new stuff in the last year at a faster rate than previous years.

Ever seen The Prestige?

Granted it’s from a partnership, but the INDX extruder seems to be on the cusp, so the idea that Prusa is behind seems odd. And the fact that they’re more open and consumer friendly than Bambu is great. There are a lot of affordable printers that have benefited from Prusa’s development while Prusa is still dropping new developments, seemingly at a greater rate now than previously.

I do this probably once a day at my makerspace. Sometimes it is the manufacturer’s fault and sometimes it’s just that the roll has gotten a tangle while being moved from machine to machine or machine to rack.

I don’t put my finger on the tangle, but usually the tangle isn’t obvious in the spool so you can’t even if you wanted to.

It’s really just a matter of spinning the filament around the roll enough to get some slack, then you pull it over the side and sort it out. Usually the fix involves pushing the filament around the spool to unbind it.

This is another one of those issues that you typically detect by hearing an abnormal sound since you’re not watching every print all the time across multiple printers.

Definitely consider if you’ll use it enough to justify the purchase, but buying a new one and spending the effort that you would have used trying to mod the old one could be better used on the new machine getting functional prints and advancing your skills.

The same amount of fiddling, accompanied with the uncertainty of the success or practicality of the mod, could be spent assembling a new printer and then printing and assembling new mods for the new printer that aren’t as essential or structural. The appeal just depends on how much focus and patience you have.

Yeah, that makes sense for your frustration. I get stabbed under my fingernails trying to take PETG remnants off the textured beds. I typically just deal with it because the solutions I’ve found are more time-consuming, but I guess it might depend on how much.

I’ve had people suggest heating the bed as high as it will go. PETG’s glass transition temperature is usually less than 90° C. I’ve seen some people print over bits to try to merge them to make them pull up easier, but that just seems like a waste of material to me. I generally don’t care for solutions that involve applying liquids or gels to the bed.

What material and what kind of plate? PEI textured plate or smooth plate? PLA, PETG, something else?

Not what you’re asking for, but I’d recommend using a laser cutter with a sheet of acrylic if you can get access to one since you’ll get a better quality stencil than 3D printing one. A vinyl cutter like a Cricut or Silhouette machine might also be able to do a better job of it on something like chipboard if you don’t have access to a laser cutter.

In my makerspace, we’ve printed using the ends of rolls just to make random multicolor prints. I also recently bought a cheap 3D printing pen for repairing prints or other random purposes, so that’s also a good use for the ends of a roll.

It looks like you’re printing it with the right side of the model in the picture angled down from the left, so you’re getting more layers to the left, which is giving you some unfortunate border and infill lines. Is it possible to print this all flat so it’s one smooth layer? If it’s the top layer, you might play with ironing as well. It’s hard to tell without seeing the whole model in context though.

When wanting more weight, but not wanting to add anything extra to the print, I use modifiers in Prusaslicer to add an internal shape that I set to 100% infill in contrast to the rest of the print. So if I want a weighted bottom to prevent a printed object from tipping over, just throw the modifier in with 100% infill at the bottom of the model before printing.

It’s especially nice to eliminate machine issues so you know that subsequent print issues are due to modeling problems or orientation while slicing or something else.

You can get a new Sovol SV06 for less than $200. That worked very well out of the box compared to my older Ender 3. Prusaslicer also has a good profile for it. I don’t care for Cura slicer as much. Enders are of an older generation of printers that I will personally avoid just because of the legacy of having to tinker with them just to get them to work. The opposite end is the Bambu where “it just works” except it doesn’t always and it’s not as easy to fix and it doesn’t play well with third parties. Sovol is a good starter printer that I’d had even better bed adhesion with over Prusa MK4Ss at work.