PETG is supposed to be petrochemical tolerant AFAIK, it is far easier to print and isn't as bad wrt Air Quality (Most filaments aren't the best to be around, PLA and PETG are nicer relative to others, ABS is nasty, nylon is really nasty, lots of fine particles and stuff if I recall, I have recirc filters on my printers and they live outside of the house)
That said, with an enclosure, a proper surface and bone dry filament, I found it to be a really nice filament to work with if you prep for it. It does have more shrinkage than ABS, I redid a lot of my hotend in PA6, was very tight in some places and a bit of a hassle to reassemble the first time, otherwise I really like it. I have an in country vendor that I usually source from, but the Glass Fibre PA6 that polymaker makes is REALLY nice to work with, found it has substantially lower warping than standard PA6, there's also low warp varieties you can look at.
Bed:
I use a Nylon Surface from a company called BuildTak, I hate to recommend brands but seriously, their surfaces are crazy good for adhesion, maintenance is a quick wipe with alcohol and that's it. They're also replaceable, peel off the steel backer and reapply.
I've seen mention garolite sheets as a fantastic surface for nylon (I think the BuildTak surface I use is a garolite sheet with their adhesive treatment, when I replaced it last time it's definitely some sort of fibreglass laminate so wouldn't surprise me). They're relatively inexpensive, a ~1.6 mm thick ~305x305mm sheet 1/16" 12"x12" is $14.50 usd on McMaster-Carr, but there's definitely 3d printing specific sheets out there.
There's the tried and true glue stick treatment, when I had a glass bed like a decade ago it was the only thing that consistently worked, I tried PA tape and masking tape, glue stick just works and makes it release easier, apply carefully and let it bake, if you're not even it'll lead to some ugly bottom surfaces, but I can live with that for functional items.
I found Nylon doesn't like to be "squished" as much as other filaments, I have my klipper setup with a slightly higher offset on my nylon sheet because of that.
Enclosure:
If you do go Nylon, use an Enclosure period. You need heat to help with warping and you ABSOLUTELY don't want to be breathing it in, it doesn't smell but gives off a lot of microparticles. As I said above, I have recirculating charcoal+hepa filters on my printers. I'd highly recommend you don't print in your living space if at all possible. I ran my bed at 100c last time, 100-110c is pretty common, I'd give it a nice long heatsoak, I tend to do at least an hour for larger prints in materials that warp.
Venting the enclosure loses you heat but actually solid for voc and particle control, don't need to worry about that if it's not there to worry about. Ideally I'd vent mine outside but I rent and I don't think the landlord would be fond of me knocking holes in the wall. Getting it out of the house and having recirc filters is the next best thing I can do.
Honestly, I don't find nylon that fussy, like anything, prepare for it and you're good. I recommend at least having a desiccant filled drybox though, they're easy to print or make and silica gel is cheap and reusable.
I'm certain the access database living in a broom closet that someone setup 20 years ago is still going strong at my last job. It was also fed by mainframe dumps, I'm super glad I never had to go anywhere near the thing personally, different department and it was explicit that they owned it.
Heck, there are already ISO language standards, and there's ISO Software Lifecycle standards, it's absolutely not a leap to move into standards adhering processes. It's not like there's no desire to do it either, code standards alone, how many times have you had discussions about style guides and coding standards company wide? It makes things more consistent and easier for different developers to maintain.
Semi related, I see a lot of non-iso standard SQL that's a pain if you do migrations or refactors, often even just sucks to read through (old school oracle joins look really strange and aren't clear compared to iso standard joins). I really wish people would adhere to the standards as much as possible.
I realised you meant this over lunch, I'm a mech eng who changed disciplines into software (data and systems mainly) over my career, I 100% feel you, I have seen enough colleagues do things that wouldn't fly in other disciplines, it's definitely put me off a number of times. I'm personally for rubber stamping by a PEng and the responsibility that comes with that. There's enough regulatory and ethical considerations just in data usage that warrants an engineering review, systems designed for compliance should be stamped too.
Really bothers me sometimes how wildwest things are.
Edit: see my response, realised the comment was about engineering accountability which I 100% agree with, leaving my original post untouched aside from a typo that's annoying me.
I respectfully disagree coming from a reliability POV, you won't address culture or processes that enable a person to make a mistake. With the exception of malice or negligence, no one does something like this in a vacuum; insufficient or incorrect training, unreasonable pressure, poorly designed processes, a culture that enables actions that lead to failure.
Example I recall from when I worked manufacturing, operator runs a piece of equipment that joins pieces together in manual rather than automatic, failed to return it to a ready flag and caused a line stop. Yeah, operator did something outside of process and caused an issue, clear cut right? Send them home? That was a symptom, not a cause, the operator ran in manual because the auto cycle time was borderline causing linestops, especially on the material being run. The operator was also using manual as there were some location sensors that had issues with that material and there was incoming quality issues, so running manually, while not standard procedure, was a work around to handle processing issues, we also found that culturally, a lot of the operators did not trust the auto cycles and would often override. The operator was unlucky, if we just put all the "accountability" on them we'd never have started projects to improve reliability at that location and change the automation to flick over that flag the operator forgot about if conditions were met regardless.
Accountability is important, but it needs to be applied where appropriate, if someone is being negligent or malicious, yeah there's consequences, but it's limiting to focus on that only. You can implement what you suggest that the devs get accountability for any failure so they're "empowered", but if your culture doesn't enable them to say no or make them feel comfortable to do so, you're not doing anything that will actually prevent an issue in the future.
Besides, I'd almost consider it a PPE control and those are on the bottom of the controls hierarchy with administrative just above it, yes I'm applying oh&s to software because risk is risk conceptually, automated tests, multi phase approvals etc. All of those are better controls than relying on a single developer saying no.
I was trying to get on the list at mt work when I got a hardware refresh this year, I dislike large laptops and the dev spec is a 17" thinkpad (which imo has the left CTL and fn keys backwards, breaks muscle memory when changing between computers) but I'm docked most times but when I'm not the battery is terrible, maybe a handful of hours. Probably due to corporate crapware, but at least the arm macbooks stand a chance, my partner has an m1 mbp and she doesn't bother charging it most workdays or work with it plugged in, she doesn't need to. We were playing factorio the other night and she was moonlighting into her desktop, she got through a day's work, a bunch of hours of game streaming and some of the next work day, that should be the expectation for a normal device.
Apple in my view really understood mobile devices, they had the hands down best trackpad for a long time, a fantastic keyboard, great display, a form factor you can actually carry around and as far as I recall, even the intel macs had better battery life.
Engineering prof in uni was big on journals/log books for cyoa and it's stuck with me, I write down everything I do during the day, research, findings etc, easily the best bit of advice I ever had.
It's kinda wild to me the the supreme court of Canada has the same number of justices as you guys, and we're a tenth of your size. We have a mandatory 75 retirement age and each region is given a block of justices, 3 for Quebec because they use civil not common law and then the rest are divided kinda sorta by population, convention has 3 from Ontario, 2 for the west (typically 1 BC, 1 for the prairies which rotates) and 1 for the Atlantic. It's not perfect but we don't seem to have the same issues as y'all do, during the Harper years for example a lot of the Tory policies got struck down by judges he appointed.
The one that made sense at a minimum for you was to have a justice from each circuit, the court should totally represent each region.
I just really like KDE, been between that and XFCE for years. Ubuntu's version of gnome when they went to that side bar layout that looks like it's meant for tablets turned me off of trying it again (though probably be great on a tablet). KDE's super customisable too, totally done a faux osx look for my laptop and use more or less stock KDE on my shop computer. I didn't mind older gnome though, isn't that what cinnamon or mate are meant to feel like?
I was writing a rant, but yeah, I'm tired of our industry being snapped up and run into the ground and important crown corps or public works being sold off for pennies.
We didn't get here overnight and we won't get out overnight either, there's definitely been some movement, lots of strategic plans and investments plus the technology superclusters are working to update our industry, just would like to see the needle move faster and like, more reporting and messaging on what's being done at each level of government because I don't feel like we're generally aware of that.
Oh Yeah I recall snowbanks at least a metre tall, some of it was definitely drifts and plow leavings but I could comfortably carve out snowforts in the front yard. I now live about 60 km from where I grew up in an area that historically has a reputation for snow, I maybe got a few cm last winter with one night giving us 20cm, think I needed to shovel 3-4 times the entire winter, usually melted within a day. For context, that's just over 20 years difference, even in the early 2010s I recall having snow and seeing ac as less needed, where I went to uni in particular you just really didn't need it for most days of the year.
Summers seem wetter, way more overcast and rainy than I recall, which has caused issues if I recall, wine producing region. Heatwaves are brutal when they do hit, was pushing high 40s with humidity.
It's going to depend on the brand, prusa recommends 45c I've done at 55 and while it printed fine, don't recommend that, PLA has a fairly low glass transition temp and that was right on the low end of where that starts.
Dry your filament. This should be the first thing you do, petg is one of the more moisture sensitive filaments in my experience, it's mostly cosmetic but can cause blobbing and it loves to stick to nozzles, I recommend a sock in general to help keep the block clean, baked on petg in setscrews sucks and I've abandoned blocks that are bad enough. You can clean them chemically but you need some nasty stuff, don't recommend.
What's your extrusion multiplier? Found it better to slightly underextrude petg, helps with blobbing and stringing.
Petg can still string even with everything tuned, it's "sticky" for lack of a better term, some whispy stuff can still happen, you can minimise it but acceptable should be your target, by that mean getting it to the point where yoh don't risk print failure, small whisps can be cleaned up with some hot air.
I'm always personally wary of storing blobs in a database if for no other reason it's going to totally be more expensive to store on a server rather than in some sort of blob storage.
Wow yeah for real, 100% my view. Was curious, looks like the owner of the trucking company got off with $5000 fine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldt_Broncos_bus_crash after pleading guilty. The people pushing behaviour that leads to incidents like this need to be held to account, What's the company doing now to ensure its drivers comply with regulations? Why did sidhu only get hit with criminal liability if the company isn't complying with regulation?
PETG is supposed to be petrochemical tolerant AFAIK, it is far easier to print and isn't as bad wrt Air Quality (Most filaments aren't the best to be around, PLA and PETG are nicer relative to others, ABS is nasty, nylon is really nasty, lots of fine particles and stuff if I recall, I have recirc filters on my printers and they live outside of the house)
That said, with an enclosure, a proper surface and bone dry filament, I found it to be a really nice filament to work with if you prep for it. It does have more shrinkage than ABS, I redid a lot of my hotend in PA6, was very tight in some places and a bit of a hassle to reassemble the first time, otherwise I really like it. I have an in country vendor that I usually source from, but the Glass Fibre PA6 that polymaker makes is REALLY nice to work with, found it has substantially lower warping than standard PA6, there's also low warp varieties you can look at.
Bed:
I use a Nylon Surface from a company called BuildTak, I hate to recommend brands but seriously, their surfaces are crazy good for adhesion, maintenance is a quick wipe with alcohol and that's it. They're also replaceable, peel off the steel backer and reapply.
I've seen mention garolite sheets as a fantastic surface for nylon (I think the BuildTak surface I use is a garolite sheet with their adhesive treatment, when I replaced it last time it's definitely some sort of fibreglass laminate so wouldn't surprise me). They're relatively inexpensive, a ~1.6 mm thick ~305x305mm sheet 1/16" 12"x12" is $14.50 usd on McMaster-Carr, but there's definitely 3d printing specific sheets out there.
There's the tried and true glue stick treatment, when I had a glass bed like a decade ago it was the only thing that consistently worked, I tried PA tape and masking tape, glue stick just works and makes it release easier, apply carefully and let it bake, if you're not even it'll lead to some ugly bottom surfaces, but I can live with that for functional items.
I found Nylon doesn't like to be "squished" as much as other filaments, I have my klipper setup with a slightly higher offset on my nylon sheet because of that.
Enclosure:
If you do go Nylon, use an Enclosure period. You need heat to help with warping and you ABSOLUTELY don't want to be breathing it in, it doesn't smell but gives off a lot of microparticles. As I said above, I have recirculating charcoal+hepa filters on my printers. I'd highly recommend you don't print in your living space if at all possible. I ran my bed at 100c last time, 100-110c is pretty common, I'd give it a nice long heatsoak, I tend to do at least an hour for larger prints in materials that warp.
Venting the enclosure loses you heat but actually solid for voc and particle control, don't need to worry about that if it's not there to worry about. Ideally I'd vent mine outside but I rent and I don't think the landlord would be fond of me knocking holes in the wall. Getting it out of the house and having recirc filters is the next best thing I can do.
Honestly, I don't find nylon that fussy, like anything, prepare for it and you're good. I recommend at least having a desiccant filled drybox though, they're easy to print or make and silica gel is cheap and reusable.