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Comment Swing voters are real (Score 1) 32

People change their minds all the time because they are wishy-washy. They're confused because they don't have a lot of good information available and they don't have the skills and training to parse what they do have.

So you can do a 6-week ad blitz and change 3 to 5% of The public's opinion on pretty much any issue which is more than enough in a winner-take-all first past the post voting system to win the election.

This is why musk gave Trump $250 million dollars right before the end of the election.

Comment Re:3D printing wasn't the problem (Score 1) 83

I've done my first test of buying a whole pallet of filament straight from a Chinese manufacturer. It's a risk - it could be all junk - but if it's usable, the price advantage is insane. Like $3/kg for PETG at the factory gate (like $5/kg after sea freight and our 24% VAT). Versus local stores which sell for like $30/kg.

Comment Re:No kidding (Score 1) 83

Early on, I was overdoing chamber heating, and later discovered that was part of my problem. A blanket and a duvet can get a P1S's chamber over 70C. But if you do that, in my experience, like half an hour or so into the print you'll get heat creep problems and the filament will split & the extruder will just dance around in the air as though it were clogged (though maybe my filament was just garbage... it certainly was *wound* terribly). I ended up using a meat thermometer stuck in through one of the holes to measure temperatures, and then I'dadjust the positioning of one small blanket over the chamber to try to keep it in the mid to upper 50s, and was able to finish big prints that way.

But yeah, whatever means you use, you need some sort of raft and very strong reinforcements.

Comment Re:Who's Stupid? (Score 1) 83

As was mentioned earlier, this isn't talking about a turbine blade, it's talking about an air intake. Also, "millimeter level"? This isn't the early 2000s. I usually print with a layer thickness of 100 microns, and the printer's control of the Z axis is well finer than that.

The problem is that they made an insane choice of a material for the intake. It was supposed to be ABS-CF, but instead it was apparently PLA. Corn plastic. The stuff people make Warhammer figures and the like out of.

Comment Re:Better info (Score 1) 83

I mean, the fact that PLA's chain is vulnerable to scission by water is in a way nice - not just from a compostability perspective, but from a health perspective too. I don't mind sanding PLA, for example, because PLA microplastics aren't going to build up in your body the way that, say, PETG or ABS might. At 60C, PLA microparticles decompose fully in just 10h. It's significantly slower at lower temperatures, but still, they don't persist. Also, a lot of people like that it's made out of corn rather than petroleum (personally, I don't care).

But yeah, it's pretty insane to use a PLA part on a plane.

Comment Re:3D printing wasn't the problem (Score 1) 83

It's pretty counterintuitive for those used to working with macroscopic fibre composites. For example, glass fibre fill adds more strength than CF fibre fill (CF fibre fill adds more stiffness). Because it's not so much about the strength of the fibres themselves, but rather how well the polymer matrix grips the fibres.

Comment It's a good thing they aren't all owned (Score 2) 32

By psychopathic billionaires who are actively trying to manipulate people into new feudal hellscape...

This is why they go out of their way to attack higher education and convince us all to be plumbers. They want us on educated and lacking in critical thinking skills. Yes some of us figure that shit out naturally most of us don't.

Comment Re:No kidding (Score 1) 83

Jesus. PLA has *no business whatsoever* being *anywhere* on a plane. Even in the cabin. It can melt in a hot car on a sunny day. It's hard but brittle. It's not entirely water-stable. It's fine to make a *model* of a plane, but making actual plane parts out of it? That's insane.

For any non-printers in here: PLA is "corn plastic". You know those compostable grocery bags? Those are mainly PLA , plus some PBAT (another biodegradable polymer, added to make it flexible). Imagine a rigid version of those bags - that's what PLA is like. They made a part out of that and stuck it on a plane.

Comment Re:No kidding (Score 1) 83

The fumes thing is overrated - typical measured levels in a room printing ABS are in the ppb range, whereas the PELs are in the ppm range. That said, don't sit right next to your printer for a long time while it's printing if you don't want to breathe a lot of styrene.

Main annoying thing is that ABS is hard to print. I mean, it's far from the hardest, that'd be something like polypropylene or whatnot - but vs. say PLA and PETG, there's a learning curve. Big thick ABS cantilevers and the like can accumulate some really significant thermal stresses. It takes practice learning how to control them (using a raft and an appropriate plate coating for the base, going way-overkill with really frequent, very sturdy supports on cantilevers, etc).

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