Designed in FreeCAD and printed on a custom Ender-3 V2. A couple more details / photos in the Mastodon thread.
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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Finally, a comm for that one user who hand-makes longbows. This ones for you, comrade.
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It's well maintained and I've had no issues with it. There's also the Ondsel branch thats based more on LinkStage and kind of an intermediate between LinkStage and FreeCAD main.
I'd definitely try Ondsel if you haven't been able to get LinkStage working, it's definitely worth it and it's got a moderate solution to the topological naming problem as well as a much more intuitive part system. Like you can extrude and pocket faces directly.
Here's a blog post about it
Upstream is adopting many of these changes. A 1.0 release candidate fully integrating the toponaming changes from RealThunder's branch is supposed to be released within a week or two. There are many other convenience features in the RT branch (like better section views, live updates to chamfer/fillets, non-contiguous bodies, etc) but backwards compatibility with existing models is much more important in upstream than it is in experimental forks like RealThunder's. Basically, it just takes time.
They don't want to adopt them because it's a breaking change as it is. The project files that were made before the patch are not fully compatible out of the box with the patch without a way to migrate them.
FreeCAD has a very X11 style development strategy of "don't ever break backwards compatibility". Ondsel is actually working directly with the FreeCAD team to bring these patches into main within the year so you can always wait. There's going to be a feature freeze until the topo issue is solved (merging Realthunder's fixes into main) then they'll release v1.0 and re-open feature development.
It was a manpower and feature creep issue. The merge would take months, it would conflict with tons of existing and in development PRs, and would require a whole new set of unit tests.
FreeCAD until recently didn't have any full time developers, so executing a merge like that would have been very difficult as the longer you spend on it, the more out of sync it becomes with the main branch and the more work you have to do to bring it back in sync.
Again, those blog posts on Ondsel or the Issues page/forum for FreeCAD have more information if you feel like looking, but it's all a very interesting story and I'm glad that it seems to finally be resolved.