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Could things just stop breaking please?

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So immediately after buying it a nice new jig and making it a new backing board, the lidl grinder gave up on the grinding life. There’s something about noticing that your bowl gouge is bouncing on the stone and then realising that that’s happening because the stone is wobbling while doing around four thousand rpm in front of your face that will trigger both a sharp step to the right out of the line of fire, and will bump up the schedule for buying kit for the shed.

I probably shouldn’t be so annoyed, I got a good five years out of that and I paid about €35 for it from Lidl, so I definitely got my money’s worth. And I’ve since taken it apart and the problem seems small enough that it can do light duty with a wire wheel or a buffing wheel later on, but for now it’s gone into storage along with the wheels (which were grand, they’re axminster wheels and are sound).… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in No Comments

3D Update

3D Printing

Over the last few weeks, the stringing problem kept going with the 3D printer. And of course, that caused things like the printing head snagging on a piece after 12 hours and dragging it off the bed…

Not great timing. I did reprint and it worked, this time with the experimental tree support structures which look really neat mid-print:

That orientation was pants though, so for the next segment, it was rotated through 90 degrees:

That worked much better.

Of course, when trying to plug one into the other…

Well, sod.
Print another in the right orientation though and…

Mind you, snapping those together was right on the edge of breaking them and it seems like PLA is *not* the right material. Also, that was the last of my first reel of PLA – I came within an inch or two of running out mid-print:

So I got some more, this time not from Creality because a lot of internet experts were sure that creality filament was the source of reliability issues with prints.… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 6 Comments

Buying space

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So I kept looking at this and trying to think of where I could stash timber and I kept coming back to the litre-in-a-pint-pot nature of the problem. And some problems you just can’t fix with tidying up stints.

But there’s this little trick you learn in engineering – you can throw money at some problems and they just go away. So I pootled off to homebase and bought a garden storage box (a Keter store-it-out midi for €120 if you’re wondering). And also got the next size up for the garden furniture because it’s driving Claire batty seeing the stuff making the back patio look messy.

Fiddly things to assemble if you get the order of operations wrong and it doesn’t help when your manual is paper mache because someone stored them outside in the rain at the garden center…

Never seen that before.… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 10 Comments