I have updated my Quick-Deploy Projector Mount to Version 2! It now uses a spring-loaded stopblock to hold the arm up, increasing the carrying capacity at least tenfold while no longer exhibiting material degradation during use. If you printed the first version you can print a small part to upgrade your existing installation as the new design is backwards-compatible! :D

I've added five new design variants to my upside-down deodorant holder! Check them out if you're also annoyed with getting the last bit out of your roller deodorant ;) Let me know if you have any other design ideas that you'd like to see done!

Influence of Nozzle size on Slinky Printability I recently had someone have an issue when printing one of my slinkies: the model wouldn’t come apart. This happens from time to time, most often the filament isn’t dried properly or the flow rate isn’t calibrated. This leads to overextrusion and the slinky fuses together, ruining it. When I asked for more info however, this person had done these things and the provided photo showed that the proper layer separation was present in parts, but not continuously through the model as usual. One thing they wrote caught my attention though: they used a 0.6mm nozzle and were wondering if this was the issue. I’ve always printed mine with the standard 0.4mm nozzle and the individual spiral runs of the slinkies are designed with a 0.2mm gap between them, exactly one layer height in the standard profile. Therefore I hypothesized that if you use a different size nozzle, with a different standard layer height, this 0.2mm gap will not fit into every layer and you’ll have some parts of the model that are printed continuously: the gap is interpolated away, so to say. Slicing the same slinky with different nozzle sizes in Bambu Studio confirmed this hypothesis: the layer height is the culprit. In Figure 1 you can see the default layer heights per nozzle size. The normal model is orange, while blue paths represent overhangs - with a single layer gap below them (or 2 layer gap for the 0.2mm nozzle). As you can see, the 0.2 and 0.4mm nozzles have continuous overhang paths along the model, giving us a great line to separate the model after printing. Using the default layer heights of the 0.6 and 0.8mm nozzles however, the blue lines are interrupted and there are large fully connected parts of model between them. If you can get these apart after printing, you have larger issues regarding your layer adhesion. If we now use the same nozzle sizes but force a 0.2mm layer height for each of them, we solve the problem. As you can see in Figure 2, all nozzle sizes give us the same image with a nicely separatable slinky. By forcing this layer height however, we of course lose a part of the time advantage, usually the sole reason we are using a larger diameter nozzle in the first place. For example for my 100mm tall flower slinky the print times on my X1C look as follows. Nozzle size (layer height) [mm] | Print time | Percentages 0.4 (0.4) | 3h36min | 100% 0.8 (0.4) | 1h36min | 44.4% 0.8 (0.2) | 2h24min | 66.6% By forcing the lower layer height we eliminate almost half of our time savings, though the print still only takes two thirds as long as the original one. I think however that giving up some time for an actually functioning model is worth it. If there’s enough demand for it, I might make a version specifically for fast printing using an 0.8mm nozzle: let me know in the comments if you’d like to see that! Cheers and thanks for reading, jpbruce