Building your own 3D printers from own designs is a labor of love. This morning I decided to quickly update 1 part and that was 5 hours ago. If this was not something I was doing its dawned on my that a cad designer would have cost probably $1000 to have this part updated. I actually have no idea how much time I’ve spent on drawing parts for my machines. I’d guess I’ve spent 200 hours over the various models.
Nice to see you using free software tools @Michael_Scholtz !
Wich one?
Which part or which software? The part today was the one that’s transparent in the picture. The reason it took as long as it did was it has to fin into the exact place the current part does. I had to increase the size of the bearing but the larger size needed the motor to be 3 mm, redrawing may have been quicker but once you’re 2 hours down the road you may as well finish it.
The software I use is Freecad for all designs, the lettering is done with inkscape and Inkscape is also brilliant for drawing gears. The flat drawings are then exported to openscad.
Which version of freecad do you use? The last time I tried to do something serious (last year or so) the latest version kept crashing or not having all its features implemented.
I’m on 0.16 now and its much more stable. I’ve had it crash in the past usually some python error on previous versions. 0.16 also has crash recovery I noticed after shutting down without saving it can up with it. During a marathon session yesterday it didn’t crash once. It does grey out while processing complex parts but came back every time.