Oct 22, 2026, 10:55 AMFreeCAD's constraint solver helped me find the angles for this complex bracket and it worked on the first try (once the printer successfully produced one). Those aren't nice 30 degrees; they are 34.9 and 25.1 because of the 20mm offset in the axle spacing and the need to meet up with a T bracket on top.
Oct 22, 2026, 11:27 AMIt has not been a good day for our printer.
Oct 22, 2026, 11:28 AMThe one that worked fits quite nicely however!
Oct 22, 2026, 6:22 PMMaybe it's just bad filament or K factor settings? This gold pla seems to work fine.
Oct 23, 2026, 12:33 PMThe new moon ring gear looks mighty fine and is much more rigid! It makes one rev every 29.53 days and has 28 spaces for shiny moon phase indicators to be installed
Oct 23, 2026, 4:09 PMMr Pythagoras grudgingly allowed a test print of the 12-piece zodiac ring.
Oct 25, 2026, 2:22 PMTwelve prints later, the outer zodiac ring is complete and we can see how it looks in the dining room. Now I need to finish the constellations and find a globe, disco ball and sun.
Oct 22, 2026, 11:25 AM@th are these in a repo somewhere? I'd love to see how you're constructing these.
Oct 22, 2026, 12:30 PM@phooky I haven't figured out a good way to check the files in. the FCStd file is about 50 MB at this point so it doesn't play well with source code control. under the covers it is just a zip and I can see that the BRP rendered version of some of the large ring gears (288 teeth!) are like 20 MB each. I wonder if there is a way to manage the internal files individually to make git happier.
Oct 22, 2026, 12:42 PM@th man, why are these things so huge? [unzips FCStd] oh no
Oct 22, 2026, 8:37 PM@th When I've had problems I've been able to resolve it by drying the filament thoroughly or cleaning the nozzle
Oct 25, 2026, 2:38 PM@th pipoos
@th Will there be an opening party; the moment of synchronicity?
@th It is strange to see that this happens so frequently on your setup on a relatively premium printer (Bambu Labs)? Although a bed slinger rather than CoreXY, still one of the top of the line printers with linear bearings and high quality components. Is the material something fancy?
Oct 22, 2026, 1:54 PM@AliMirjamali it is a used A1 from a friend who upgraded to a larger unit, with nearly 2500 hours of print time. I'm not using fancy or even premium filament, and don't have a dryer, so this might be a material problem.
@th RIP