Here’s the problem with that, though. It’s not going to be like there will be roving goon squads going from door to door snatching away your wives and daughters or anything. Even the MAGA-heads are just barely clever enough not to form themselves into any kind of entity that you could physically fight.

Instead, they’re going to chip away at everybody with asinine laws and legislation, selective enforcement and remote harassment, by filing mountains of frivolous lawsuits, etc. They’ll seize property. They’ll get you fired from your job. They’ll kick you off of your health insurance and freeze your bank accounts. Those responsible are never going to actually expose themselves in any capacity in which they can get got, because they’re cowards; they’re going to hide behind their desks and layers of security and fences and metal detectors and cops and the secret service. If it turns to outright violence vis-a-vis war in our own cities, it would be monumentally stupid for them to send troops marching down the street, and they won’t. They’ll just remotely bombard an entire city block and blame all the collateral damage on “leftists” or “wokeism” or whatever. And idiots will believe it, and then blame the victims.

“That’s ridiculous,” you say. “The government would never bomb anyone on US soil.”

You want to bet?

An AC-130U. We can play a game of see how many times you can hit it with the side guns before it lands in the ocean.

I, too, have one of these “landlord special” properties.

I predict really the only thing you’re going to have much trouble with is plumbing. Everything you find will be rigged, or leaks “fixed” with gobs of silicone rather than actually replacing the fitting, shut off valves omitted to save costs, etc.

Don’t go crazy buying tools just yet, but be prepared for the fact that you will, over time, wind up having to invest in quality plumbing tools probably including some specialty stuff like broken stub extractors, short-throw tubing cutters, faucet seat wrenches, etc.

Measuring with the printer is an excellent idea. When in jog mode, mine displays the nozzle coordinates right on the screen.

I was considering that a truly dedicated nut could figure out which layer the print failed at (possibly approximately) and hand edit the gcode for the print to just replace all the layers up until the failed one with Z axis move up to that height. I think that would be problematic, though, because on my machine at least the model still being on the bed would definitely be in the way of the print head homing at the beginning of the print, and I don’t know if there’s any way to force it to skip that part of the procedure. Failure seems likely, and the penalty for failure is high.

Just printing the remaining half of the model and supergluing the parts together seems like a better idea.

My Qidi has a heated chamber and can allegedly do it stock, and I’ve had an unopened spool of pure Nylon sitting in the printer cabinet for over a year.

But I’m chicken.

If your nozzle can withstand it, glass filled is way easier to print.

Your slicer should also be able to compensate for this already.

PLA only shrinks about 0.3% which is negligible unless you are designing with super tight clearances. A 6mm hole, for instance, will be out 0.018mm which is probably scraping against the XY resolution limits of most consumer 3D printers anyhow.

Other materials can definitely shrink more. ABS is harder to manage than PLA, but for instance Nylon/PA’s shrink rate is comparatively immense – around 2%. The various engineering polymers that are filled with something like carbon or glass fibers actually tend to shrink less than their raw counterparts.

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Cripes. I’d dissolve like the Wicked Witch of the West.

If it were me, I probably would not be able to resist the urge to make whatever inserts you develop compatible with a Gridfinity baseplate, because I am that kind of nerd.

To create perfectly console-shaped two dimensional inserts, or at least close enough, I would start by laying each system flat on a piece of paper and tracing around it with a narrow bodied mechanical pencil. Stick this in your scanner and make an image out of it, and then trace over that image at scale in the CAD software of your choice (FreeCAD is… free). This will automatically come with a built in amount of clearance in the amount of half of the width of the body of your pencil.

Just make a flat base with a wall sticking up maybe 2-3mm thick or more if you feel like it, to roughly half the height of each object. You can put some gaps in it if you prefer to have places to grab the item directly.

And for anyone who winds up struggling with this when trying to gauge their own printer, make sure this option is enabled:

This is in Prusa/Slic3r and its derivatives. If this is disabled, the final outer wall perimeter can wind up being pushed out by some fraction of the width of the wall behind it, which will have the net effect of shrinking vertical holes in your model (and other critical clearances in the X/Y dimensions) by an unpredictable amount.

As long as you stay within its plastic deformation limit, “many cycles” should not matter.

PLA’s downfall for flexible design elements is permanent deflection. It cannot be used on anything that is expected to stay in its tensioned state for anything more than a few seconds. This is why PLA works for catapults and toothpick guns and latches that have a single position rest state where the flexible element is relaxed. If you leave it under tension, though, even just for a few hours, it will not spring back fully. Eventually, it just won’t spring back at all.

Through much testing (read: slowly pissing myself off) I determined in the course of developing my Rockhopper that ABS is the best commonly available choice for permanently or semi-permanently loaded printed spring fixtures – at least out of what most normal and sane people can print with their hobby level machines. Even PETG is better than PLA in that respect, but PLA was useless for me.