Another 3D Printer

It's winter again, the season of endless grey, where going outside isn't an obvious choice. This winter has been another one without much snow, so even the mountains have lacked their call. This tends to be the season where my attention moves inside, to projects.

For over a year, my two 3D printers were out of commission. The Ender 3 was on its last legs before I bought it, and the Voron was always a project printer - the amount of work to make it operational dwarfed the time it worked productively. Both of them had hit show-stopping issues which I hadn't had the motivation to fix.

And for a lot of the time my interests lay elsewhere, so that a lack of printing capability didn't really impact my life. But enough projects needing a printer had begun to pile up that last December I started considering buying another one. Buying a third printer attracted almost universal derision from my friends.

I'll cut to the chase. I got a Bambu Lambs A1-Mini. It's print volume was smaller than the Ender, and it couldn’t print ABS, but the rumors were that it printed with barely any tinkering or maintenance required. I didn't need another project printer, so this sounded perfect.

There are some caveats. I don’t like the way that Bambu Labs are pushing 3D printing to a less open source and more proprietary style, but the printer has a LAN mode that lets me disable all the cloud stuff. It isn't completely maintenance or project free - I had to disassemble the extruder on the first day due to a clog, and the firmware has led to a few strange issues.

But, by and large, it's been a success - it fails rarely enough that I'm comfortable leaving it running on long projects without checking on it. I've even got comfortable doing multiple prints on the same plate, which was a recipe for disaster with the Ender.

The first project I started diving into was to organise my workshop a bit better. I'd been hankering to try gridfinity which solved a lot of the problems I'd had when trying to design my own similar system before. Within a week, my desk had drawers full of satisfyingly tidy boxes full of small project parts.

As an easy first design project, I started to design a small set of gridfinity compatible drawers to sit on top of the desk. I was also interested in another popular design - the honeycomb storage wall, and was interested in a way to combine both in a way that segued from the horizontal back of my desk to the wall.

Thus I designed these drawers. They're certainly not perfect, but it's quite nice to have an easy place to put in-progress project parts, or the kipple that tends to accumulate on my desk.