Brief hiccup

Apologies to all my regular visitors (all three of you...). My web site registration was up for renewing. I had set it on auto-renew, but I forgot my credit card had expired late last year and I forgot to update the card details so of course payment was declined and I was too busy to check until yesterday.

Anyway, all is back to normal now.

Sneak peek of what I've been doing in the last couple of weeks is in the photo above.

I now have enough walls and columns now to fill my Hive Secundus board. What I had mid-December:

I’m working on slowly printing the top platforms.

I originally started by printing the roofs. Then the assembly guide came out (AFTER I started the printing) and realised I got it all wrong.

Now I need to print platforms and stairs for verticality for games outside of the 2-player Hive Secundus dungeon crawl. i.e. normal Necromunda games but using the Zone Mortalis terrain.

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Latest update:

The Creality Ender 3 v2 had been giving me lots of problems which is why the hobby side of the blog's been pretty quiet. Mainly issues with the filament not sticking to the bed, faulty filament extrusion, messy filament extrusion… (I'm beginning to see a pattern here...)

So in the end I sold it off at below cost and got myself… (drumroll…)

For those of you into 3D printing, it’s a Bambulabs A1 Mini. Many say it’s like the iPhone when it first came out, compared to all other so-called ‘smartphones’ that came before it. For those old enough to remember, they were clunkers. Any fans of Android phones just don’t know how much the modern world owes to Apple and the iPhone. 

So, the Bambulabs A1 Mini (didn’t have the funds for an A1*… maybe I should start a Patreon?) just works. Send it a file, it auto-levels the bed, monitors the filament flow (and even has a camera to monitor the printing process!!!!), auto-calibrates itself,  (a process that takes a bit over 5 minutes) then starts printing and oh my gosh. The results! On a standard 0.4 nozzle using standard 0.2 layer heights. It… there are no words. See for yourselves.

No more messing with DIY levelling with a piece of paper (a process that could take more than 5 minutes), calibrating the heating element, nozzle, making sure the filament feed is secure… it’s heavenly!

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The fly in the ointment. The snake in the bush. The poison in the apple…

Only downside: Bambulabs themselves. They had a breakthrough product on their hands. Their reputations was assured. Rock solid. Then they had to pull an Adobe and require registration, only using their servers to do the slicing jobs etc. It’s only a matter of time before you have to PAY to use their servers.

Hence the Adobe reference: MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTIONS.

Hasn’t happened yet. But you can read the writing on the wall.

So why did I get a Bambulabs anyway? Simply: there was no other viable option (as of this writing, and that may change in the months/years to come). The Ender 3 v3 is now available for a slightly lower price than the A1 Mini… it’s open source so no proprietary nonsense and does have a self-levelling plate… but at the end of the day it’s still an Ender. Code for: it’s still for hobbyists, i.e. those whose hobby is 3D printers as opposed to those who just want to print 3D stuff.

I've heard it said that Bambulabs printers just work... until they don't. Then fixing them can be a pain in the you-know-where, worse than fixing an Ender 3.

So… we shall see.

Anyone else out there have Bambulabs printers? What are your thoughts?

*The Bambulabs A1 has a build plate of 256 x 256 x256 as opposed to the A1 Mini’s 180 x 180 x 180 and the Ender 3 v2’s 220 x 220 x 220