Few consumer printers can print this material any better than PEEK. The Bambu H2D and Prusa’s HT90 can just do it. And $60 while cheaper than PEEK, still ain’t much of a bargin for the vast majority of hobbyists.

Yeah, they have taken some things proprietary with software and hardware. This was done in response to Chinese manufacturers, and yes Bambu in particular, taking the proprietary pathway and not giving new ideas back to the open source community.

Now, Bambu making proprietary products is well within their right. But that makes life harder for a true open source manufacturer to make enough money to stay in business. So it ain’t taking 20/10 vision to read the writing on the wall if Prusa intends to stay in business. So there is a real need to protect themselves.

If you are willing to spend the money, I would highly recommend a Prusa. The quality of service and support alone is worth the extra money. If the cost of a Prusa bothers you, I would point you at Qidi as a more budget friendly brand. If I was starting over and looking to buy my first printer, I would be looking at the Core One or the Qidi Plus 4. And Qidi is set to release their own AMS called the Qidi box for the Plus 4 here shortly.

Edit to add: There is nothing to fear from Klipper. MainSail is easy to pickup and use.

I remember when Walmart sold boxed releases of RedHat and Mandrake. My first installs were fueled by $20 boxed releases at Walmart. I was so bummed when they stopped. But I could send away for Ubuntu releases on a CD for free.

Thanks to Trump, there appears to be some initiatives in Europe for governments to switch to open source. It seems they want to try and get out of relying on US companies for their technology. That would make a large jump in the user base.

They have tried before, and not had the best luck in dropping US vendors. Things seem to run out of steam at some point and they switch back. It will be interesting to see if things stick more this time.

I’m pulling for them to succeed.

I did Gentoo for a bit also. Ain’t enough hours in the day…

Real men and women run Slack. Tarballs Yum!

To head off the zealots-- ./././

My first guess is the author is aggregating the numbers from either the distros download data directly or they are getting the numbers from some place like Distro Watch. You can even get a crude sense of the increase in new users if you hang out in a distro help forum. I check the r/Fedora sub on reddit a few times a week, (I run Fedora 42 BTW), and there has been enough of an increase in new users posting “OMG, I just ditched Windows and look at my shiny new Gnome/KDE desktop!” to be annoying to some people. It can be hard to find those posts from people looking for help with a problem sometimes.

What no one can say is just how long those shiny new users will stick with Linux or run back to Windows at a later date. My gut feeling is, if half of this new 5% sticks it’s a major, major victory for all the distros.

At that diameter, I would probably recommend a bottle cap thread. It’s a rounded profile that is easy to print.

Under Quality – Layer Height – First Layer Height. Adjust the layer height as needed. Generally speaking, your first layer should be no less than half the nozzle diameter. So, a .40mm nozzle first layer height should be .20mm. Thought for larger beds, you may wish to increase the first layer height a bit to help with bed adhesion over a wide area.

My first inclination is to got to Quality – Walls and surfaces – Avoid Crossing walls and check that box. See what happens when you print your Benchy.

If you still have issues, go to you filament settings for the filament you are printing with, (the little pencil to the right of the filament box), make sure you have the Advanced slider on, click on the Settings Overrides tab and check the Length, Z-hop height, On surfaces, (select All Surfaces in the drop down box to the right), Retraction speed, (the default is fine), the De-retraction speed, (set to zero), Travel Distance threshold, Retract on layer change, Wipe while retracting, and wipe distance.

This is a start.

Having single pointed 3"-4 Buttress threads on a manual lathe for punch presses more than once and hand grinding the tool bit from 1/2" x 1" HSS, I still have some PTSD over that thread form. But hey, if you are looking to make breaching for a 16" Navel Rifle, it’s really the only game in town…

As a toolmaker, I have seen Buttress threads used in only 3 places. Large artillery breaching, punch press ball screws, and VERY high end, (read expensive), machinist clamps. I own a pair I picked up at an auction 30 years ago in a bucket of “junk”. I think they were made by another machinist for personal use.

Edit to add: Buttress threads are directional. They can be either left or right. The choice being totally dependent the direction of the force applied to the threads. The perpendicular edge is the strong part. And the direction must always be called out.

Number series machine screws get their designations from wire gage sizes that they were made from. Which traces back to several different British thread systems waaayyy back in the day. While there is no hard and fast rule, the number series screws are sometimes referred to as ‘Machine screws’ while fractional series fasteners are referred to as ‘Bolts’. No one knows why, and Whitworth is dead. (Toolmaker humor).

All actual diameters of screws are a bit under nominal for external and a bit over size nominal for internal. This is the clearance needed to make a screw and nut fit together. This all applies to metric thread fasteners also. Thread fit classes are a story for another day.

A custom vee thread screw and nut, as you have done, is easily done in the Thread Profile workbench. As a workbench, I don’t think it’s all that popular, at least it’s not going to be as popular as the Fasteners workbench.

Other than creating the head of the screw and the shape of your nut as a separate sketch and pad, you can simply fill a couple of boxes with your own numbers, click the helix button, then click the Additive Loft button, both provided in the workbench toolbar, wait for the threads to generate, and it’s done. And it’s parametric.

I recommend checking it out if you’re using FreeCAD.

Prusa Core One with MMU or Qidi Plus 4 and the Qidi Box. The Qidi Box is at the pre-sale point now. They have been taking things slow with their AMS unit. Either printer is affordable and in the size range you want. Both are corexy, Qidi run Klipper and Prusa runs Marlin firmware. Both brands have heated enclosures to make printing fussier filaments easier. And PETG definitely benefits from that.

If I was starting over and wanted a larger printer, it would be a coin flip choice between those 2 printers.

The problem with new PEI sheets everyone sells, is that they make the PEI so thin that it wears out so fast. It’s like when they go to cut a slice off the PEI tree, they damn near miss the whole tree. And the popularity of textured sheets doesn’t help either.

I have a smooth PEI sheet that came with my Prusa Mk3s 6 years ago. It has 1000’s of hours of print times on it. After about 4 years of heavy use, it just wasn’t much good anymore. And I didn’t feel like buying a new sheet, so I took the chance and very lightly hit with some 1000grit wet/dry sandpaper to renew the surface. It now holds better than when it was new. And I can probably sand it again if it ever needs it. But new PEI plates aren’t coated half as thick either. So my Bambu plates will have to be replaced at some point.

I got my A1 mini just a month or two before this current unpleasantness, so I was taken unaware. But since I’ve never been interested in using much of the Bambu software ecosystem, switching to LAN mode a month ago has been no big deal for me because I was leaning that direction anyway. And my current firmware version, 1.04 works well so no need to up grade. Nor is Makers World all that important to me.

But there are so many users that just don’t care and will swallow what ever dreck Bambu feeds them.