Finally, I had to opportunity to acquire a long desired tool, a 3D printer. In recent years these have become fairly affordable, and also easy to use. So it is on longer needed to spend days with optimizing various settings. I am planning to print mostly in durable parts, so I am targeting PETG and ABS rather than PLA plastic materials. Mostly planning to use it for spare parts, or mold patters for aluminum casting.

The machine, it is an Artillery Sidewinder X2, a great product, all nicely arranged in a box.

It didn’t take long to set it up, maybe one hour, and then you can use the well known software packages to run the machine. I am using Freecad for modeling and Cura for processing.

All worked fine already for the first part… great!

A cylinder, and a space shuttle. All fairly robust.

So far, I can only praise the machine, it is working fast and precisely. Just printing low cost PETG material. Key point is to keep the bed rather hot to keep the parts sticking, and then just remove them after cool-down with no effort.