This post is a handy reference for the technical reasons why requiring 3D printers to screen for gun parts is not an effective way to reduce guns or gun violence. I am publishing it on the occasion of both New York and Washington State introducing bills to require this type of screening. In addition to a topic that I have been researching for over a decade, the question of how to know if a 3D printer is printing a gun part is something I spent a lot of time working on while overseeing trust and safety at a large 3D printing service provider.

This post is not about debating the larger legitimacy of gun control. It assumes that gun control is a reasonable and legitimate action of governments in order to focus on the technical reasons why requiring 3D printers to identify and refuse to print gun parts does not work.

What filament is strongest? The real answer is “it depends”, but sometimes you have a simple question and you just want a simple answer. Like, which material makes the best 3D printed wrench? [My Tech Fun] printed a bunch of options to find out — including some expensive filaments — and got some interesting insights in the process.

His setup is simple: he printed a bunch of 13 mm open-end wrenches, and tested each one to failure by cranking on a clamped digital torque meter until the wrench failed by breaking, or skipping.

[My Tech Fun] tested a total of eighteen filaments, from regular basic PLA, PETG, ABS and ASA, and a variety of carbon fiber-infused filaments including PPA-CF. TPU is included for fun, and there’s also a wrench printed with continuous carbon fiber, which requires a special printer. More on that in a moment. First, let’s get to the results!

In a recent video [QWZ Labs] demonstrates an interesting technique to use 3D printing to make creating custom PCBs rather straightforward even if all you have is a 3D printer and a roll of copper tape.

The PCB itself is designed as usual in KiCad or equivalent EDA program, after which it is exported as a 3D model. This model is then loaded into a CAD program – here Autodesk Fusion – which is used to extrude the traces by 0.6 mm before passing the resulting model to the 3D printer’s slicer.

By extruding the traces, you can subsequently put copper tape onto the printed PCB and use a cutting tool of your choice to trace these raised lines. After removing the rest of the copper foil, you are left with copper traces that you can poke holes in for the components and subsequently solder onto.

Laser welding is getting a lot of hype right now as the tech starts to trickle down into the prosumer market. The primary advantages, compared to something like MIG welding, are precision and reduced heat. Those just happen to be attributes you’d want in a metal 3D printer, so Cranktown City strapped his Sky Fire WeldStar laser welding machine to a 3D printer motion system to see what would happen.

Putting a welder on a 3D printer isn’t a new concept. But conventional welding processes produce an absurd amount of heat that tends to ruin things. The heat alone from a basic MIG welder can be enough to make ¼” steel plate look like a Pringle. Laser welders still make the material hot, but the heat is much more focused and controllable.

Now that laser welders are somewhat affordable (this particular model has a pre-order price of $6,300), it is feasible to try 3D printing with one — at least if you’re an entertaining YouTuber that is able to get the machine for free.

Carbon fiber (CF) has attained somewhat of a near-mystical appeal in consumer marketing, with it being praised for being stronger than steel while simultaneously being extremely lightweight. This mostly refers to weaved fibers combined with resin into a composite material that is used for everything from car bodies to bike frames. This CF look is so sexy that the typical carbon-fiber composite weave pattern and coloring have been added to products as a purely cosmetic accent.

More recently, chopped carbon fiber (CCF) has been added to the thermoplastics we extrude from our 3D printers. Despite lacking clear evidence of this providing material improvements, the same kind of mysticism persists here as well. Even as evidence emerges of poor integration of these chopped fibers into the thermoplastic matrix, the marketing claims continue unabated.

As with most things, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. A recent paper by Sameh Dabees et al. in Composites for example covered the CF surface modifications required for thermoplastic integration with CF.

Have an old Android device collecting dust somewhere that you’d like to put to better use? [Electronoobs] shows us how to make a Masked Stereolithography Apparatus (MSLA) printer for cheap using screens salvaged from old Android phones or tablets.

[Electronoobs] wanted to revisit his earlier printer with all the benefits of hindsight, and this is the result. The tricky bit, which is covered in depth in the video below the break, is slicing up the model into graphics for each layer, so that these layers can be rendered by the LCD for each layer during the print.

I've been on the fence about 3D printing for years. Not because I thought it was useless, but because I wasn't convinced I'd get enough repeat value out of it to justify the space, the cost, and the learning curve. That changed the moment I bought a Bambu Lab P2S, and it changed again once I discovered the self-hosted Manyfold application.

This is my first real step into self-hosting for 3D printing. I don't have LAN-only control enabled on my printer yet, and I'm very aware that Bambu's cloud-first approach is controversial. But even at this early stage, Manyfold has already become one of the best self-hosted applications I run, and I say that as someone who self-hosts everything from media servers to home automation to custom dashboards.

Mercifully, modern machines do a lot of the heavy lifting to mitigate what used to be common troubles with past generations of desktop 3D printer. That being said, there are simply too many variables and convergence points that can cause trouble – it’s almost inevitable when you’re first starting out that you’ll run into something that causes a print failure.

Here are a few common mid-print fails, what causes them, and how you can address them.

An accessible 3D printer for metals has been the holy grail of amateur printer builders since at least the beginning of the RepRap project, but as tends to be the case with holy grails, it’s proven stubbornly elusive. If you have the resources to build it, though, it’s possible to replicate the professional approach with a selective laser melting (SLM) printer, such as the one [Travis Mitchell] built (this is a playlist of nine videos, but if you want to see the final results, the last video is embedded below).

Hardware hackers tend to have loads of hookup wire, and that led [firstgizmo] to design a 3D printable wire and cable spool storage system. As a bonus, it’s Gridfinity-compatible!

Concerns are being raised within the 3D printing community regarding the Bambu Lab A1 after a recent video by YouTuber Grant Posner (3D Musketeers) revealed a possible safety issue. Posner has seen an alarming number of A1 printers with charred or melted cases, which suggests that the A1’s AC power distribution board may be operating above normal temperatures, posing a risk of fire. The AC power board uses an NTC thermistor to limit inrush current and is active only while the printer is rapidly warming up. Posner claims this thermistor is being pushed too close to its rated limits.

A friend of mine and I both have a similar project in mind, the manufacture of custom footwear with our hackerspace’s shiny new multi-material 3D printer. It seems like a match made in heaven, a machine that can seamlessly integrate components made with widely differing materials into a complex three-dimensional structure. As is so often the case though, there are limits to what can be done with the tool in hand, and here I’ve met one of them.

I can’t get a good range of footwear for my significantly oversized feet, and I want a set of extra grippy soles for a particular sporting application. For that the best material is a rubber, yet the types of rubber that are best for the job can unfortunately not be 3D printed. In understanding why that is the case I’ve followed a fascinating path which has taught me stuff about 3D printing that I certainly didn’t know

A lot of claims have been made about the purported benefits of adding chopped carbon fiber to FDM filaments, but how many of these claims are actually true? In the case of PLA at least, the [I built a thing] channel on YouTube makes a convincing case that for PLA filament, the presence of chopped CF can be considered a contaminant that weakens the part.

Using the facilities of the University of Basel for its advanced imaging gear, the PLA-CF parts were subjected to both scanning electron microscope (SEM) and Micro CT imaging. The SEM images were performed on the fracture surfaces of parts that were snapped to see what this revealed about the internal structure. From this, it becomes apparent that the chopped fibers distribute themselves both inside and between the layers, with no significant adherence between the PLA polymer and the CF. There is also evidence for voids created by the presence of the CF.

We live in a time where 3D printing has become so accessible that the waste it generates as a byproduct is now of concern. Building projects are easier than ever, but often supports or failed attempts pile up in the trash and end up going to some landfill instead of being recycled. But what if you could actually recycle all that filament? It's not a novel concept; large-scale extrusion machines already exist, but they're expensive — that's what the ExtrudeX aims to change with its Kickstarter campaign.

A severed mosquito proboscis can be turned into an extremely fine nozzle for 3D printing, and this could help create replacement tissues and organs for transplants.

Changhong Cao at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and his colleagues developed the technique, which they call 3D necroprinting, because they were unable to find nozzles thin enough for their work on manufacturing very fine structures. The narrowest commercially available nozzle they could find had an interior bore of 35 micrometres and also came with a hefty £60 ($80) price tag.

Biqu is slowly becoming my personal highlight at Formnext. Year on year, you find useful, unexpected, and sometimes funny products that show the brains behind the brand not only have a sense of humour, but want to inject that into your 3D printing. This year has been no different.

In the trade halls of Frankfurt, between the deployable printers redefining the battlefield, industrial debuts, no-waste toolchangers and politics, Biqu is colorfully forcing users’ freedom of choice on Bambu Lab’s famously closed ecosystem with an upcoming kit for older Bambu Lab P-series machines called Panda Cyborg.