It's Funny Because It's True

The linear rails modified Ender-3 has its new, high flow, high heat hot end and printed lift feet for the new telly. No new land speed records, like what killed the cheap nasty hotend, but this was a cosmetic print, anyway. But seriously, these machines are like an abusive partner we keep going back to.

They rarely fail at the start of a print or, if they do, it's your fault for not setting it up right. No, most of the time, they'll fail ten minutes from the end and waste most of the roll of your most expensive, least recyclable filament. Still, we makers keep patching up the beast in what looks, from the outside, like a bad case of sunk cost fallacy.

Today, this "grandfather's axe" of a machine delivered. I must have modded it enough to have doubled its AU$300 ticket price, so it bloody well ought to deliver, but it really delivered. It's only a practical print, the new telly doesn't quite have enough clearence underneath its stumpy by elegant legs for my surround amplifier, so it had to have style and good finish. I printed it in wood fibre impregnated PLA and it really does look like fine grained, matt finished unvarnished bamboo laminate. The nearly imperceptability of the layer lines making the bamboo illusion complete. The CNC made cum art deco inspired design lines just tie the technology of digital, network linked TV to our beautiful, Early 20th Century, Melbourne home.

The lovely Linda came home from today's responsibilities and, on viewing the solution to ill-fitting tech space under the telly, exclaimed, "Oh cute! They look really good."

In the words of the Red Dwarf character, Kryten, "Smug mode. Hmm..." With this major fit out, which also included a 32 bit control board, I'm starting to relax into making. The "better half's" approval, was the marzipan wrapping a rich fruitcake of a wedding stack.

No doubt, there will be days NOT like these in my machine studio, but I'm comfortable imagining a world where Geordi Laforge doesn't have to swear at a replicator because, in our century, we did that and spent enough time on the replicator's primitive ancestor, the 3D printer, to make the effing thing squeeze out its pathetic trckle of "hot glue," layer-by-layer. Smug mode today was earned.

*Yes, I know Geordi is Star Trek and Kryten is Red Dwarf. It's not a mixed metaphor, they are two distinct metaphors for unrelated aspects of my story. You can be a fan of multiple cannon.