Investigating The Health Impacts Of UFPs And VOCs From FDM Printers

May 20, 2026 by Maya Posch 22 Comments

FDM 3D printing is fairly messy on a molecular scale, with the filament being heated up to temperatures high enough to melt it, which produces ultra-fine particles (UFPs) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in addition to the new plastic item on the build plate. Recently [Simon Pow] got somewhat worried about this pollution considering that he spends a considerable amount of time in the same room as FDM printers, sharing air.

While there is a lot of context within the topic, it’s notable that even ‘low risk’ PLA already emits formaldehyde, a group 1 carcinogen. Studies like this 2022 one by [Taehun Kim] et al. on formaldehyde, PM10 and PM2.5 show that common filaments like PLA, ABS and TPU score pretty bad here, even compared to the often maligned resin printing, also in the study. Having good ventilation in a room helps a lot, but it doesn’t reduce the levels to zero.

As noted by [Simon], PETG is much better in the VOC area, while TPU emits siloxanes, some of which are dangerous but most are considered harmless. Once you hit nylon (e.g. PA6), you’re adding caprolactam, which is mildly toxic but mostly just an irritant. Where things get serious is with ABS and ASA, when you add styrene to the mix. This substance is very dangerous, being toxic, mutagenic and possibly carcinogenic, but on the plus side it smells kind of sweet.

Polycarbonate (PC) emits BPA, with its worrying long-term health implications, while carbon fibers in particular can have asbestos-like long-term effects, as we covered previously. Definitely wear PPE while doing things like sanding CF parts and safely dispose of any debris.

Of course, you can do something about this problem, such as having an enclosure around the printer, with HEPA filtration and activated carbon, potentially exhausting into the outside air. The options here are covered in the video, including a BentoBox filter. For [Simon] the biggest improvement – as measured by a whole room sensor – came from a big fan in the window, while the default activated carbon filter in the Bambu Lab printer did effectively nothing.

The problem here is mostly one of long-term exposure, so even basic precautions like filtration and ventilation can already make all the difference. Ideally you’d not have the printer in the same room as where you work, of course, but adding a good filtration setup doesn’t have to be expensive or hard.

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A DIY 3D Printing Filament Dryer

May 20, 2026 by Maya Posch 20 Comments

In a recent video [Saša Karanović] revisits the DIY filament dryer that he gave a shot a couple of years ago. Back then he reused an existing filament dryer, adding a custom controller and such to improve its performance.

This technically-not-fully-DIY dryer got some feedback since then, and thus the V2 version is an example of how to better DIY such a dryer, including a custom PCB and a GitHub project for all the details.

Those who just want to dive into the documentation for assembly and the BOM can look at the available documentation. At its core the whole assembly consists of some kind of container like the shown 5L food storage type, along with an SHT30 temperature and humidity sensor and 100 K NTC temperature sensor. These connect to the controller board which then switches on or off the 12 V polyimide resistive heater.

One thing that could be improved here is that the saturated warm air has nowhere to go. This is a common issue with filament dryers and why it’s recommended with even commercial filament dryers like the common Sunlu types to leave them slightly ajar so that the moist air can be replaced with cooler air that can much more readily absorb moisture.

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Recreating A Broken Laminated Wooden Furniture Part

May 19, 2026 by Maya Posch 20 Comments

Everyone loves those rather bouncy wooden lounge chairs that got popularized by a certain Swedish seller of furniture, but as tough as they are, the laminated wood can still break at some point. The chair that [John’s Furniture Repair] got in for repair had cracked right around where a bolt hole had been drilled, apparently creating a weak spot that over the years turned into a crack.

The way to fix this issue is to recreate the one piece of curved, laminated wood as demonstrated in the video. This starts with tracing the contours of the original part on a piece of MDF, which then gets doubled up by a second plate of MDF. After cutting out the contours this then creates the two halves of a mold for the laminated part.

Next is preparing the layers of wood that will become the new part, making sure to keep the same final thickness as the original. With everything glued up the layers are put into the mold, clamped down and the glue left to dry.

Finally, the part is freed from the mold, cut to its final size, and sanded down to prepare it for final treatment and installation on the lounge chair. Perhaps the only negative one can say about this kind of fix is that after you’re done, you really get that itch to sand down and re-lacquer all of the other parts as well so that they also look new and shiny.

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How Search Engines Enabled Finding Needles In A WWW-Sized Haystack

May 19, 2026 by Maya Posch 15 Comments

When the World Wide Web surged into existence during the 1990s, we were introduced to the problem of how to actually find something in this ever-ballooning construction zone that easily outpaced even the fastest post-WW2 urban sprawl. Although domain names provided a way to find servers using DNS rather than having to mash in IP addresses, you still somehow had to know the relevant URL.

A range of solutions were thought up over time, ranging from printed Yellow Pages type guides, to online curated lists of resources, as well as things like web rings where one website would link to a relevant similar website. This was the time when word-of-mouth was also very relevant, with people proudly announcing their own website on Geocities or other hosting service.

Search engines already existed long before the WWW became the hot new thing during the 1990s, but it was the WWW that would really push them to their limits. As anyone who used search engines for the WWW can attest, they had many issues. Often you’d end up using multiple search engines to find something, and despite fierce competition between web search engines to become the starting page for their browser, actually finding things on the WWW remained a tough problem.

Since a web search engine ‘just’ has to index the WWW and match a search query against the results, why was this such a hard problem that persisted until Google apparently cracked the code?

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Remembering The Tech We Lost With A Virtual Graveyard

May 19, 2026 by Maya Posch 29 Comments

Although 1999 might still feel like yesterday for some of us, in the world of technology the intervening years are practically an eternity. New websites, applications and devices pop up all the time, only to die off just as fast again for a variety of reasons. Amidst such chaos it’s always good to take a breather and reflect on all that we have lost, such as on the virtual graveyard that [Burak Ozdemir] created with hand-written obituaries and only the classiest of 90s-era web design.

Remembered are everything from instant messengers and social networks to web hosts and devices. Who still remembers their ICQ number? There was a good chance that you were also on GeoCities or similar web host back then too. Maybe you weren’t really into Google+, but some of us still have fond memories of its virtual hangouts that provided a connection to people around the world in a way not since replicated.

Not all of the entries are as well-known, of course, with not everyone remembering or ever having heard about services like Songza. A few rare entries on the list have punched a zombified hand through six feet of soil and shambled back into the daylight, such as the Pebble devices. Some entries are quite more recent, with many probably remembering Microsoft’s short-lived Tay that made clear that public chatbots need a lot of safety rigging, a lesson that was mostly remember by subsequent chatbots.

Although some things like forum signatures and personal homepages arguably still live on, the death of Clippy will definitely be mourned by many.

Electroplating 3D Prints Without Requiring A Big Vat

May 18, 2026 by Maya Posch 21 Comments

Electroplating 3D prints is a good way to get a pretty nice coating on even a basic PLA part, but generally you’re expected to dunk the entire part into a big vat with electrolyte after coating it with the requisite conductive paint layer. This is great for small parts, like a ring you’d put on a finger, but gets rather silly when it’s a much larger part, such as the one in [Hendrik]’s recent video. Out of curiosity he tried to see whether rotating the part through a much smaller vat would still get you an even coating, or not.

Perhaps ironically this process required building a custom vat out of acrylic, as well as an entire rig to hold up the part and gently rotate it. This highlights the main disadvantage of this approach, in that unless you’re doing a small production run or otherwise get to re-use the rig a lot it’s a lot of extra effort.

That said, the rotation is controlled by an ESP32 and a stepper motor along with a requisite stepper driver, with the most exotic part being the whole custom PCB and enclosure, all of which can be used repeatedly. With all of that tested and confirmed working, the part to be plated was sanded, sprayed with conductive paint and hooked up to the rotating rig for an overnight run.

Following that the part’s new copper coating was polished before more layers of electroplating were applied to get the desired two different colors from different metals. Along the way no issues were found with this method of rotating electroplating, so if you regularly struggle with oversized parts to electroplate, this would seem to be a viable method.

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Building A Working Replica Of The Chernobyl Power Plant’s SKALA Display

May 18, 2026 by Maya Posch 3 Comments

In a recent video by the [Chornobyl Family] it’s shown how they made the SKALA status display which was featured at the recent 40-year memorial exhibition of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) #4 reactor accident, along with the RBMK reactor control panel replica and SKALA console which they had made previously.

We previously covered this SKALA control system of the ChNPP’s RBMK reactors, as well as its 1990s modernization. This SKALA status display is one of the original elements of the control room, providing a status overview of the entire control system at a glance, including its processors and peripheral devices.

The replica uses similar looking components, with a metal casing and LED lighting that invokes the aesthetics of the original electroluminescent mnemonic panels. Overall the goal was to keep the appearance as close to the original as possible — they even had operators of the ChNPP reactors look over the panel and give it their stamp of approval.

Some of the components like the error indicators had to be 3D printed, while the metal case was cut out of sheet metal. There’s also a very big speaker for the alarm, at the top right of the panel. Along with the LEDs for the electroluminescent-style indicators this meant a lot of addressable LEDs and a lot of wiring.

The full build plans are available via the [Chornobyl Family] Patreon, if you feel like building up your own RBMK-style reactor control room.

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