303
Dryer knob broke so I carefully engineered a temporary fix while we wait for the replacement part.
(pawb.social)
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2026
303 points (99.7% liked)
Dull Men's Club
4333 readers
459 users here now
An unofficial chapter of the popular Dull Men's Club.
1. Relevant commentary on your own dull life. Posts should be about your own dull, lived experience. This is our most important rule. Direct questions, random thoughts, comment baiting, advice seeking, many uses of "discuss" rarely comply with this rule.
2. Original, Fresh, Meaningful Content.
3. Avoid repetitive topics.
4. This is not a search engine
Use a search engine, a tradesperson, Reddit, friends, a specialist Facebook group, apps, Wikipedia, an AI chat, a reverse image search etc. to answer simple questions or identify objects. Also see rule 1, “comment baiting”.
There are a number of content specific communities with subject matter experts who can help you.
Some other communities to consider before posting:
5. Keep it dull. If it puts us to sleep, it’s on the right track. Examples of likely not dull: jokes, gross stuff (including toes), politics, religion, royalty, illness or injury, killing things for fun, or promotional content. Feel free to post these elsewhere.
6. No hate speech, sexism, or bullying No sexism, hate speech, degrading or excessively foul language, or other harmful language. No othering or dehumanizing of anyone or negativity towards any gender identity.
7. Proofread before posting. Use good grammar and punctuation. Avoid useless phrases. Some examples: - starting a post with "So" - starting a post with pointless phrases, like "I hope this is allowed" or “this is my first post” Only share good quality, cropped images. Do not share screenshots of images; share the original image.
.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In my experience, you're missing two steps. "Forget again how to print" because at some point, you're running out of models that are already available. Then the printer collects dust for two years, leading to "re-learn how to print and calibrate". I now own my third printer and never got around to teaching myself CAD. Must be happening soon though, I'm convinced.
That is way to accurate to be funny. I bought a printer a few years ago, printed a couple of things, worked pretty well after fiddeling for a few days. I was finally ready to print the thing i actually wanted to. Problem with the z-axis. Ah that's a problem for another day. Two years later i looked at that printer going: what even is anything?
I'm not horrible with CAD, but I always forget how to print. Well, not so much "forget" as "can't be bothered to sort out the software".
I have a MakerBot Replicator Mini which I bought second-hand. It only works with an old version of MakerBot's proprietary software, which is only available for Windows. I've since switched to Linux on all of my machines, so I'd have to do a lot of fiddling to get it to work.
Maybe the software works on Wine, I haven't tried yet. I don't really want to run a Windows VM just for this, but it's much more likely to work. Getting the STLs into the MakerBot software would be pretty annoying.
If I was more enthusiastic about it, I might want to replace the brains of the printer with something more universally supported, so it just works on standard 3D printing software. But it's so low in my priorities list that I don't think I'll ever do that.
Maybe I should just look for a makers space where there are public 3D printers that you just pay per print. But I don't know if there are such places in my country at all, let alone my city.
Linux and cad or slicer software don't get along, i found out. I mean i didn't try suuuper hard, but definitely not out of the box. With a grudge i reinstalled windows on my laptop to use it just for cad and printing. A horrible experience to beginn with, but everhthing worked. The next day, the laptop suddenly had no internet connection. It could find every wifi network, except my own. I reinstalled everything and it worked. Used my wifi to print, nice. Next day, same thing. No internet, my wifi was gone. I'm no computer wizard, but usually i'm pretty good at dinding solutions online and fix problems. This one is so ultra specific that when you look for something like: can't find wifi or whatever, everything else comes up. I had wifi, it worked... Twice. Anyway, i fucking hate windows
I got myself a printer with a 370°C hot end so I can print all of the filaments, including stuff that gets used in areas like an engine bay or needs to be very robust mechanically. If I'm not gonna learn some basic CAD, I might as well sell it and not think about 3D printing.
If you're not already used to any CAD software, I really recommend FreeCAD. It used to be pretty horrible, but the recent releases (1.1 especially) make it genuinely excellent IMO, quite a lot more user-friendly, and fun to use. It's still got a learning curve to it like literally any professional/creative software, especially those as complex as CAD, but there's a strong community with plenty of tutorials and resources that you can learn from.
I have heard that it's much harder to learn if you're already used to other CAD software, with one Lemmy user telling me it's far worse than switching between any other two CAD solutions. But since you don't have that baggage, I think you can do alright.
FreeCAD is not user friendly. Even with tutorials it never seems to behave the same way twice.
FreeCAD is what I made an attempt at last year when 1.0 was released. There is a bunch of great tutorial videos and files out there, so there's definitely no lack of resources. It's more a "I need to be willing to dedicate time to learning it on a regular basis" problem. I learned some basics, printed one or two of my creations and then stopped for some reason. Now I gotta start at zero once again.