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.

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.

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.

an aquantance made one from PLA ... ... WHY?

There's literally no reason you shouldn't at least use PETG. PETG is even *easier* to print, and *cheaper* than PLA. Was this long ago, when PLA still had a stranglehold on the market?

Aviation has a lot of rules, but it's not for pointless reasons. When things go wrong in aviation, they tend to go very wrong, and you sent some big heavy mass carrying hundreds of people travelling at many hundreds of kph crashing into a building.

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.

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).

You can do PPS at 300C and it has nearly as high of a working temperature. From a factory in China I've bought filament from before, you can order it (with a minimum order of like 60kg, mind you) for like $15/kg.

PPS is a fun one. Maximum service temperature of 220-240C, yet melts at 280C and you can print it at 300C (doesn't require a super-high-temperature printer). You can literally cast some pewter alloys directly in it in a hot oven. :) Also does not dissolve in any known substance below 200C.

ED: Sorry, didn't read enough into your post. But the TL/DR is: know what stresses and temperatures your part will be exposed to, and make sure the part can actually withstand them. And if you can't do it directly with plastic, then either use something like Virtual Foundry Filamet + sintering, or print a mould and cast it.

What they mean by "carbon fibre 12" is probably CF-filled PA12, a nylon. PA12 CF has a maximum working temperature up to 170C, vs. (for the two most common filaments) ~80C for PETG and ~60C for PLA.

The thing is, everyone who has been printing for more than a couple days should be familiar with all of this. It's honestly shocking that they'd use a material that doesn't tolerate the heat in question. Did they not know how hot it was going to be? Was there a chain of miscommunication, where the person who did the print wasn't told how hot it was going to be by the person who requested the part? Or was the printer just a moron?

While this is being used as an anti-3d-printing story, I think the real problem is just that 3d printing makes manufacturing so much easier, that a lot less is being done by engineers and more by amateurs who often aren't as diligent at studying what a problem actually needs and work more by guesswork.

Eastern Europe was screaming about how dangerous this was, but they weren't listened to.

One of the most insane things is how after Russia's surprisingly poor military performance in the Georgian war, the Merkel government was disturbed not that Russia invaded Georgia, but at the level of disarray in the Russian army, and sought a deliberate policy of improving the Russian military. They perceived Russia as a bulkwark against e.g. Islamic extremism, and as a potential strategic partner. They supported for example Rheinmetal building a modern training facility in Russia and sent trainers to work with the Russian military.

With Georgia I could understand (though adamantly disagreed) how some dismissed it as a "local conflict" because it could be spun as "Georgia attacking an innocent separatist state and Russia just keeping their alliances". But after 2014 there was no viable spin that could disguise Russia's imperial project. Yet so many kept sticking their fingers in their years going, "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" and pretending like we could keep living as we were before. It was delusional and maddening.

The EU has three times Russia's population and an order of magnitude larger of an economy. In any normal world, Russia should be terrified of angering Europe, not the other way around. But our petty differences, our shortsightedness, our adamant refusal to believe deterrence is needed, much less to pay to actually deter or even understand what that means... we set ourselves up for this.

And I say this to in no way excuse the US's behavior. The US was doing the same thing as us (distance just rendered Russia less of a US trading partner) and every single president wanted to do a "reset" of relations with Russia, which Russia repeatedly used to weaken western defenses in Europe. And it's one thing for the US to say to Europe "You need to pay more for defense" (which is unarguable), even to set realistic deadlines for getting defense spending up, but it's an entirely different thing to just come in and abandon an ally right in the middle of their deepest security crisis since World War II. It's hard to describe to Americans how betrayed most Europeans feel at America right now. The US organized and built the world order it desired (even the formation of the EU was strongly promoted by the US), and then just ripped it out from under our feet when it we're under attack.

A friend once described Europe in the past decades as having been "a kept woman" to America. And indeed, life can be comfortable as a kept woman, and both sides can benefit. America built bases all over Europe to project global power; got access to European militaries for their endeavours, got reliable European military supply chains, etc and yet remained firmly in control of NATO policy; maintained itself as the world's reserve currency; were in a position that Europe could never stop them from doing things Europeans disliked (for example, from invading Iraq); and on and on - while Europe decided that letting the US dominate was worth being able to focus on ourselves. But a kept woman has no real freedom, no real security, and your entire life can come crashing down if you cross them or they no longer want you.

(Score:X, Troll)

And yet, your imaginary friend still isn't real. ;)

They clearly didn't even use a proper image generator - that's clearly the old crappy ChatGPT-builtin image generator. It's not like it's a useful figure with a few errors - the entire thing is sheer nonsense - the more you look at it, the worse it gets. And this is Figure 1 in a *paper in Nature*. Just insane.

This problem will decrease with time (here are two infographics from Gemini 3 I made just by pasting in an entire very long thread on Bluesky and asking for infographics, with only a few minor bits of touchup). Gemini successfully condensed a really huge amount of information into infographics, and the only sorts of "errors" were things like, I didn't like the title, a character or two was slightly misshapen, etc. It's to the point that you could paste in entire papers and datasets and get actually useful graphics out, in a nearly-finished or even completely-finished state. But no matter how good the models get, you'll always *have* to look at what you generate to see if it's (A) right, and (B) actually what you wanted.

And clearly God (who as we know, is a scalar field) is an AI. That's why there's so much "slop" in the Bible - factual errors, contradictions, different versions of the same text that heavily contradict each other, etc etc. It all makes so much more sense now!