• 2 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle


  • I’m a mechanical eng turned software, computing and the like are super visible but there’s been a huge amount of advancement in physical things in our lifetime, Steel in particular. By no means an expert, some of this I’ve been out of the industry for a while so just operating on memory, totally welcome any corrections!

    I’m not a metallurgist, but worked with them, there’s lots of grades out there but some of the stuff being used in automotive is seriously interesting (I think they’re boron grades but I can’t recall), needs specific treatment like hot stamping but they can easily hit into the 1-2 GPa range for yield strength once it’s processed. It’s allowed material to be rolled thinner for the same part strength so you end up with lighter vehicles.

    Coatings too have changed a lot, non-chromium passivation is a thing, galvanised materials are no longer just zinc + a bit of aluminum, there’s aluminum + silicon coatings that are supposed to offer decent corrosion resistance at high temperatures, those fancy automotive steels get coated in it for things like mufflers. Construction there were zinc+magnesium coatings starting to show up, supposed to be resistant to coating damage.

    Processing has changed a lot in a century too, steel is substantially metallurgically cleaner these days, probably actually cleaner too with more electric arc furnaces and hydrogen direct reduced iron.

    It’s oldish these days but pipeline inspection was increasingly using Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducer (EMAT) tools when I worked in that field. It let you do ultrasound inspection of steel pipes without needing a liquid medium, so things like cracks and material defects that are hard (or nearly impossible) to find using Magnetic Flux Leakage tools are a lot more accessible to gas pipeline operators as they don’t need to do things like plan around liquid batching.



  • Bit of a, bit of b, thermal protection on printers sets a minimum hotend and bed temperature, it’s configurable but 0c is pretty common. Drop below that and the firmware will trip an emergency shutdown in klipper, some (mk3s) set off an alarm beeper when that happens.

    Higher ambient helps with chamber temps too depending on what you print. I let my printers heat soak for at least an hour before I print anyhow, the space heater gives some stability in ambient temps.

    Also done prints where I’ve just blasted the hotend and build plate with a heatgun to get above the min temps to be able to get a heat soak going. Vorons have a decently powerful bed heater (~600w if I recall), my mk3s isn’t nearly as powerful but still capable of sustaining itself (would definitely benefit from insulation)



  • I don’t live in the coldest place but it’ll hit -20s c at the coldest in the winter with -10 +/-5, summer is 30 +/-5. My garage isn’t climate controlled but not the largest, a space heater is enough to bring ambient up enough to be comfortable, certainly enough where the printer firmware doesn’t kick out on low temperatures.

    I have enclosures so it helps some, mk3s doesn’t get super warm as it’s currently setup but I do regularly successfully print abs on it, petg and pla aren’t an issue at all, voron gets substantially warmer. Summer, enclosures need to be open to print pla depending how hot it is. Even with all that, I’d recommend it, I do it primarily for air quality reasons, I’ve printed abs indoors without an enclosure in the same room exactly once a long time ago, 0/10 don’t recommend.


  • Stuff that’s in use I try to keep inside the enclosure, no humidity control in my garage so at the whims of humid continental climate, gets nasty in the summer. I keep things vac sealed with silca gel for long periods and print from dry boxes or enclosure mounts to take advantage of the lower humidity while printing.

    Working on a powered dry box using solid state dehumidifiers like used in this, hope that’ll help with humidity issues.

    Some filament isn’t super sensitive, my experience pa6>petg>abs=pla.