You can save so much money with CAD if you neither factor in your time to actually learn it or the cost of the printer itself.
Makes crime even better in comparison.
I have wasted a bunch of time making things, but like woodworking or similar trades, it’s fun and rewarding.
Hence, why it’s not “wasted” time.
There are places which will print out your model for a small fee on their own printer. There are even places which will allow you to use their printer if you come with your own filament (for example makerspaces) and maybe donate a little bit to support them.
As for CAD itself, there’s a nonzero chance that someone already designed that part for themselves and you can download a ready model. If not, then by designing it yourself you’re acquiring a skill that can be useful again in the future and you can share that model with others to get that warm fuzzy feeling that you’ve helped strangers who had the same problem.
Someone else I know got a printer and got bored printing with it after a bit and said I can print on it whenever if I toss them a roll of material every now and then.
I ended up finding all kinds of useful things to print. I made a connection piece for a sink that had a garbage disposal removed when I couldn’t find the fitting anywhere and after 3 years it’s holding up fine. I made a set of cams for a washer that randomly stopped spinning one day and those have been working nicely. Just a bunch of times it ended up coming in handy.
The saving on the knob alone would pay a reasonable chunk of a basic but useful printer. Use it for a few more things and you’ll be in the black even ignoring the more fun things you might do. The time it takes to learn a CAD system can also be fun if you enjoy that sort of thing.
I’m proof. My first printer is currently worth like $25. Maker Select V2. Still works great. I learned FreeCAD and enjoyed every minute.
compooter + printer still go brrrrrrrrrrr
More of a brrrrr zoop zoop eeeeeeep save me brrrr doop ding please zrrriiippp scooop
As someone who replaced his Maker Select Plus with a Bambu Lab P1S a few months ago…if you do get a new printer, be prepared to be angry for a moment.
I spent so much time and effort improving that thing over the years, and the modern printer was so much better right out of the box. 😅
(Not that I don’t still have a fond place in my heart for my old bedslinger. A friend has it now, so it’s still chugging along.)
Haha yea I did, actually. A few months ago I built a Voron 0.2. It’s soooo much better in every way. But the MS2 is still capable, especially with upgrsdes (just not with ABS). I decided against the Bamboo route because I loved the FOSS nature of the MS2, and building the Voron brought back those ‘first time building a PC vibes’. It was a great experience.
I’ve got a Sovol Max on order, so the MK2 will probably also be donated to a friend this year.
Nice! I’ve considered a Voron, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to dedicate that much time to the printer as opposed to the printing. (I feel like I got my fill of excessive tinkering already 😅)
But the closed nature of Bambu does bother me, I’ll admit.
Yea, I was told I “have a 3D printer hobby, not a 3D printing hobby”. 😆
I loved building the Voron, but did decide to go with a Sovol instead for the larger machine to both avoid the build and have a larger volume.
The 0.2 was great because it was cheap, didn’t need to be my main printer at the time so I could be patient with it, and it is blazingly fast, especially heat up time since the bed is so small.
Learning a new and useful skill is not “wasting” time at all.
You can’t put that in quotation marks like I ever said something about wasting time. You just have to include all that time in your cost calculation.
Not really, no. If you’re learning something not only that you like, but that it’s also useful and that you will you use many times in the future, I wouldn’t consider that to be part of the “cost”.
Here in Canada every major library I’ve been to has a 3D printer you can use, either for free if you bring your own filament, or for a very small fee to use theirs. I live in a small town of 70,000 people and our public library has a 3D printer.
I would just like to say that 70k people isn’t a small town. I live in a town with 9k people in it. Now that’s a small town.
9k? That’s a major city. I lived and worked in an area where the 9k town about an hour away was the bee’s knees for the folks where I was, which had a great!!! city of 2,500, and the rest were unincorporated places of a hundred or so at the crossroads.
Shoot, I just moved to town under 1k.
Only 9k people? That’s not a town, that’s a village.
/s
My printer has saved me more than it’s cost in useful stuff I have printed.
My printer has saved me more than its cost in useful stuff I have printed.
Ahhh priceless
I though you needed consent to put sometimes knob in you pocket …
Or you just do the most practical thing and order a $2 replacement from Amazon/Aliexpress
How much time it takes for a regular cad user to draw such a knob?
Lol “regular CAD user”
I mean, we exist.
There’s dozens of us! Dozens!
Eh eh, I mean someone who can draw quite good, not a beginner.
I spent less than an hour to design these guards for our stove, and most of the time was on how it looked. I wanted it to be functional, but not look too out of place.
That link doesn’t load for me? I’m really interested in what you designed. I tried turning my WiFi off and use cellar in case my pihole was interfering but that didn’t load either. Any chance the link formatting got messed up or something?
https://www.printables.com/model/278668-stove-knob-guard
Not sure why it’s not working for you. I tried it with a couple of browsers in incognito mode and it works fine for me.
Weird, I can get to it now. Thank you so much for following up and sorry for wasting your time. Those guards are really cool, it isn’t what I envisioned at all, your approach is really sleek!
Like 5 minutes.
It is basically 2 rings and a plate with some text on.
Always fun drawing them up in Tinkercad.
Why are people breaking/losing knobs on their ranges in the first place? I’ve never done that in 4 decades. Seems like an extremely unlikely thing to do.
Some guy once broke into my brother’s backyard and stole the lid to his BBQ. Just the lid.
Sounds like a tweaker preparing to join a Roman Phalanx
Enshittification is probably a large part. However, I can see it.
Our’s are plastic, 25 years old, and look like crap. Wash them all you want, they just look dirty all the time. I’d replace them except for the absurd cost for a piece of molded ABS.
I take them off to wash them. I can imagine someone having an accident with one, like washing them in dishwasher and having one fall down onto a heating element. Those are big, but our’s are small enough to get knocked down onto the garbage disposal - it would’t be easy, and would require an unusual sequence is events, but I’ve fucked up even more unlikely sequences of events in my life.
I really wish I could get decent aluminum replacements for our’s; it wouldn’t make the range any newer, but it’d make it look nicer than the black plastic shit that it came with.
Aluminum casting is fun and cheap.
I know my limitations. One of them is patience.
I was thinking the same thing? Who are these animals that somehow destroy a metal knob on a commercial-style $8000 Bosch oven that is made of stainless steel?!
Those knobs probably aren’t metal, but plastic with a metal plating.
My only guess is that they have children who steal the knobs and flush them down the toilet or something. But the knobs on those high end models are pretty huge which means they would probably get stuck and refuse to flush down.
People with toddlers often keep the knobs off as a form of baby proofing, when the kiddos are tall enough to reach but not old enough to listen. It’s then easy to lose a knob that isn’t in the right place.
I completely forgot until now that my daughter used to steal the knob from our dishwasher on a near daily basis. I remember confiscating it one morning and accidentally bringing it to work in my pocket.
Oh, that’s brilliant! I guess its better to lose it all together than to give a toddler access to fire/a really hot thing
Yep. They also sell childproof knob covers for them, you have to pop open the lid to reach them.
I’m embarrassed it took a few times of the toddlers walking off with the knobs inside the covers before we realized we could just… not leave the knobs on. I blame the fact that they never slept more than 90 minutes at a time…
I think if you have young children you shouldn’t have a high end range like this (especially gas). A standard range with the knobs at the back where they’re much harder to reach would be a lot safer.
Sometimes people have kids after moving into a place/buying things, too.
I would have said the same thing but the enshitification isn’t just for the web anymore - I had a ‘quality’ name brand refrigerator and snapped the drawer down the front because I pulled on it a little too hard. Those things used to be bulletproof but now they’re flimsy crap.
Yep happen to our fridge. Not mention it quit working after 2 years of use. Now buy mine off FB market place. Why bother buying new.
You can accidentally hit a knob and break it while moving the appliance itself. As for losing them, sometimes you knock one loose and it rolls under the fridge, and it’s not worth the effort of moving a large appliance out of its nook just to get the knob back. Shit happens.
Maybe you were just a miracle child who never has accidents. Who knows?
Ours is a cheap model, but the knobs are held on with a plastic housing inside the knob similar to that middle plastic tube that holds keycaps center on keyboards. Im constantly worried its going to break when i take them off to clean.
Or do the lazy thing, and just keep borrowing other knobs.
I learned this from my dad… When I was young, we had a plumbing leak on a Sunday night, p-trap was leaking. All places were closed, so he went to a McDonald’s bathroom and stole theirs to replace ours.
20 something years later, my faucet was leaking. It was a discontinued model from a brand owned by home Depot, though they still had the display model up. Remembering what my pa did, I took the display model apart and took what I needed.
From this story alone I have several ideas of what your accent is, also this is the type of shit my kin would pull. I’m more of a "how many parts can I daisy chain while maintaining no leakage, my record is 12 which was the minimum needed. I hope an actual plumber never looks at my bathtub plumbing cause the faucet is certainly doing things much like my computers cable management.
I am interested in what you assume me accent be, though I’ll give ya some hints and you tell me where I’m from…
My wife teases my pronunciation of butter and water as they come out as “budder” and “wooder”, house roofs as “woofs”, and I call water creeks “cricks”. She also laughs at me when I get angry \ passionate as I become louder and sound like “one of those Italian gangsters from the old bugs Bunny cartoons”. And she’ll repeat back to me, exaggerated, “whaddya talkin about?!” as I seem to ask her that before every debate…
Well initially I was gonna guess North Eastern Coastal, or perhaps some of the less known accents from Western Appalachia but I’ve known folks from around Bakersfield who pronounced water, butter, and creeks like ya so I ain’t got no fucken clue. It’s one of those things where its got overlaps with but not totality with accents I do know, even my own accent does the budder thing. But now I ain’t so certain.
Philadelphia! Very astute, my friend. Where are you yourself?
I somewhat thought that getting an education, working white collar, social media, and living in Europe the last 6 years that I would have of lost my accent. Hence why I found your comment so interesting!
SoCal more specifically Inland Empire San Bernardino foothills.
Also your accent stay with you hell it can even stay with your kin depending on various factors. My accent is basically just an old regional accent but if I get pissy enough it rapidly devolves into a bastardized brogue. But yeah I find dialects and accents interesting especially in how they mutate diverge and reconverge.
Also if you are at all curious I pronounce it budder, wader, and rooves.
lmaooo that’s why bathrooms in those places now have the minimal setup to work properly. Good to know that I can be part of the change.
I need to figure out how to do cad/3d printing, cuz I’m begining to lose control! Well, I’ve already lost CTRL on both sides of my keyboard because the keycap sleeve broke and it constantly falls off the switch (cherry mx red).
There was this one time when I needed to replace a specific part of a dog bike trailer. I contacted the company: the creator of the trailer, who happened to live in my neighbourhood came to my place to give me a piece from the prototype he still had in his workshop. Shop local!
I’m so glad I learned THEFT
I know right? They need to teach it in schools!
Knob from your crush? Priceless.
I did a similar thing, not because my knob broke though, I just didn’t like the heiroglyphics bosch designed 😅
From a cost-savings perspective it’s actually kind of genius, cause now they don’t have to localize the text for multiple countries. Just produce one stove, throw a °C/°F setting on the display for the Americans, and profit.
ßake? Must be Japanese.
The B looks like the German ß which makes the s sound. That would make it say sake, which is a Japanese kind of alcohol.
Could someone point me in the right direction to get started on projects like this? Specifically I have an old Emerson CRT that the volume/power knob is missing on and it’s impossible to find an OEM replacement. I’ve been dreaming about getting into 3D printing to print my own, but I don’t know where to even begin considering I would need the exact dimensions of the D shaft and then to model something. Appreciate any help, thank you in advance <3
Honestly, if you only have that one specific application in mind, might be more cost/time-effective for you to pay someone else to 3D print/ship the part for you, instead of getting into all that yourself just for the one use case.
I’ve had that thought too, but I’m a tinkerer and I dream of printing parts for my random protects. I appreciate the suggestion though!
The first time I took on modelling a replacement part, I took as many measurements with a caliper as I could, fired up Fusion 360 and just went for it with no prior experience. It is actually really intuitive and all you need to do is visualize how simple shapes like circles and squares can be used to construct the object. Basically, don’t be scared of starting out and try to break down the object into simple and approachable parts.
My first object was a kind of transmission cog, so a very cylindrical object, much like yours. All you really should need is the diameters of different “circles” comprising the model and the cylinder heights.
There are lots of things I would like to fabricate I just suck at 3D software. Fusion 360 easy?
To me it became easy once I realized that Fusion 360 is not Blender. You’re not sculpting a model. You’re essentially just writing mathematical equations (“constraints” in CAD lingo) that produce the desired 3D object. For example, let’s have a flat circle as a base with diameter x, then we extend it into the third dimension with length y, and so on. Once I realized how it works, it became much clearer to me what to do, because I literally just need to express my goal to the computer et voilà. I’m having a difficult time translating what I mean into words, but perhaps you can remember doing some kinds of geometric constructions in elementary school like a perpendicular line through the middle of another line. That’s exactly what CAD feels like to me.
This sounds like a great path for me, I love driving in head first. I appreciate you!
Back in the day, that was solved with a vice grips. This is because vice grips are the wrong tool for everything, but the right tool for not having to go find the right tool.
Get yourself some cheap calipers, radius measure, etc from Amazon. You don’t need to spend a million dollars for some basic instruments. This will help you measure things you find in the real world.
For CAD, if you want a really easy on-ramp, try using “Tinkercad”. They have a free option for users and there are lots of people who have made really usable replacement parts for things. If you end up really liking it, there are more powerful and complex CAD programs out there, but this will get you a friendly start without spending a lot of money.
If you have problems on the printer end, you can export your Tinkercad projects and send them to “Shapeways” (or other vendors) who will take your CAD file and return a 3D print in the mail. You can also buy your own 3D printer if you wish.
That should get you started, and if you pull all 3 of these threads, you will be able to start reproducing things around your house. Have fun!
There’s https://lemmy.world/c/3dprinting where you could get more answers. The yt channel TeachingTech has some good series on getting into various parts of it (basics of printing, part design, machine maintenance, etc.). There are many other resources.
I appreciate the links! I’ll do some learning 😁
Once you have a printer, there are repositories online with models for just about anything. I’ve used Printables, and Thingiverse is another option. Someone may have already solved your problem by posting a usable model, just need to print your own part. Otherwise you can design one. Been using Solid Edge from Siemens, they have a free version for makers. Also used FreeCAD in the past, which worked, but wasn’t happy with it. It now has a 1.0 release though, so probably worth trying out. They’re going to require spending some hours learning to do designs properly, but once you figure it out you can sketch up all kinds of great things. I love being able to send my parts through the slicer software, then over to the printer, and out comes what I want. Learning CAD, or modeling software like Blender, gives you a lot more options with your printer.
I’d like to take this opportunity to say sorry to all the people that ended up buying the WD-40s I stole the straw off of.
Oh, are we confessing to
minorthefts? Let’s see, what’s beyond 7 years old…A Hogwarts robe clip from a Halloween costume
$12 in expired powerbars
About $200 in assorted mediocre liquor from some wedding
4 posters from bus stops for the Scooby-Doo movie
A 1999 Ford Explorer
7 Playboys and a bag of old coins
97 million kisses from my missus
(Edit: the largest thefts are the kisses)
I’m telling the missus that you think her kisses are only minor theft worthy!
At scale, it’s a felony, I promise!
A Hogwarts robe clip from a Halloween costume
Shame on you
I used to shoplift handheld electronic games, stuff like Electronic Quarterback by Coleco. I was a paper boy and I would walk into stores with my bag around my shoulder and just grab games off the counter and slip them in the bag. What blows my mind now is that this was even possible - this was the late 1970s and apparently I was something of an innovator because the stores never suspected anything or searched kids, and the electronic games were just sitting out on counters. It wasn’t long after this that stores started only allowing two kids into the store at a time and shit like that, and searching them when they left.
You’re welcome, subsequent generations of would-be shoplifters! You’ll never know just how fucking easy we had it.
I once ate the baby carrots from the grocery store, right off the display. I am not sorry about it.
I don’t think there’s anything in that story to be sorry about.
There is, you need to wash vegetables before you eat them
Man, i mean while we’re fessing up to these things…
If you bought a PC gamer magazine from Barnes and noble back in like 2004 and the demo disc was missing, I’m so sorry.