Garden Hose Gets Laminar Flow

June 8, 2025 by Al Williams 14 Comments

We aren’t sure if [Joshua Bellamy] is serious that he wants a laminar flow to water his plants, but there are many places where having a smooth and predictable flow of water is useful or even essential. With his 3D printed adapter, you can produce laminar flow from any garden hose.

If you haven’t heard the term before, laminar flow is to water what a laser is to light. The water moves in parallel tracks with minimal mixing and turbulence. Ensuring laminar flow is often critical to precise flow metering, for example.

This isn’t [Joshua]’s first attempt. He has made a nozzle like this before, but it required a lot of assembly (“more fiddly bits than a Swedish flat-pack sofa” according to the post). Depending on the version, you’ll need various bits of extra hardware in addition to the 3D printed parts. Some versions have drop-in nuts and even an LED. Fiberglass insulation at the inlet diffuses turbulence, and some manual work on the output provided better results. When everything is working, the output of the hose should look like a glass rod, as you can see in the video below.

Air can also have laminar or non-laminar flow. Laminar air flow in a laser cutter’s air assist can make a big difference. If you don’t fancy 3D printing, you could save some drinking straws from your last few hundred trips to the local fast food emporium.

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A man’s hands are shown in the foreground holding two splines, each with teeth both on the interior and exterior surfaces. Both are identical in shape, but one is larger and made of plastic, and the other is smaller and made of metal.

Freeze-drying For Improved Metal Printing

June 6, 2025 by Aaron Beckendorf 12 Comments

For all the remarkable improvements we’ve seen in desktop 3D printers, metal printers have tended to stay out of reach for hackers, mostly because they usually rely on precise and expensive laser systems. This makes it all the more refreshing to see [Dan Gelbart]’s demonstration of Rapidia’s cast-to-sinter method, which goes from SLA prints to ceramic or metal models.

The process began by printing the model in resin, scaled up by 19% to account for shrinkage. [Dan] then used the resin print to make a mold out of silicone rubber, after first painting the model to keep chemicals from the resin from inhibiting the silicone’s polymerization. Once the silicone had set, he cut the original model out of the mold and prepared the mold for pouring. He made a slurry out of metal powder and a water-based binder and poured this into the mold, then froze the mold and its contents at -40 ℃. The resulting mixture of metal powder and ice forms a composite much stronger than pure ice, from which [Dan] was able to forcefully peel back the silicone mold without damaging the part. Next, the still-frozen part was freeze-dried for twenty hours, then finally treated in a vacuum sintering oven for twelve hours to make the final part. The video below the break shows the process. Continue reading “Freeze-drying For Improved Metal Printing” →

Slide Rule By Helix

June 4, 2025 by Al Williams No comments

It is no secret that we like slide rules around the Hackaday bunker, and among our favorites are the cylindrical slide rules. [Chris Staecker] likes them, too, and recently even 3D printed a version. But spurred by comments on his video, he decided to try something that might be unique: a helical slide rule. You can see how it works in the video below.

With a conventional slide rule, the scale is rotated around a cylinder so that it is the same length as a much longer linear scale. However, this new slide rule bends the entire rule around a cylinder and allows the slide to move, just like a conventional slide rule. If you have a 3D printer, you can make your own.

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Add Wood Grain Texture To 3D Prints – With A Model Of A Log

June 3, 2025 by Donald Papp 34 Comments

Adding textures is a great way to experiment with giving 3D prints a different look, and [PandaN] shows off a method of adding a wood grain effect in a way that’s easy to play around with. It involves using a 3D model of a log (complete with concentric tree rings) as a print modifier. The good news is that [PandaN] has already done the work of creating one, as well as showing how to use it.

The model of the stump — complete with concentric tree rings — acts as a modifier for the much-smaller printed object (in this case, a small plate).

In the slicer software one simply uses the log as a modifier for an object to be printed. When a 3D model is used as a modifier in this way, it means different print settings get applied everywhere the object to be printed and the modifier intersect one another.

In the case of this project, the modifier shifts the angle of the fill pattern wherever the models intersect. A fuzzy skin modifier is used as well, and the result is enough to give a wood grain appearance to the printed object. When printed with a wood filament (which is PLA mixed with wood particles), the result looks especially good.

We’ve seen a few different ways to add textures to 3D prints, including using Blender to modify model surfaces. Textures can enhance the look of a model, and are also a good way to hide layer lines.

In addition to the 3D models, [PandaN] provides a ready-to-go project for Bambu slicer with all the necessary settings already configured, so experimenting can be as simple as swapping the object to be printed with a new 3D model. Want to see that in action? Here’s a separate video demonstrating exactly that step-by-step, embedded below.

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3D Printing A Capable RC Car

June 2, 2025 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

You can buy all sorts of RC cars off the shelf, but doing so won’t teach you a whole lot. Alternatively, you could follow [TRDB]’s example, and design your own from scratch.

The Lizard, as it is known, is a fun little RC car. It’s got a vaguely Formula 1-inspired aesthetic, and looks fetching with the aid of two-tone 3D printed parts. It’s designed for speed and handling, with a rear-wheel-drive layout and sprung suspension at all four corners to soak up the bumps. The majority of the vehicle is 3D printed in PETG, including the body and the gearbox and differential. However, some suspension components are made in TPU for greater flexibility and resistance to impact. [TRDB] specified commercial off-the-shelf wheels to provide good grip that couldn’t easily be achieved with 3D-printed tires. An ESP32 is responsible for receiving commands from [TRDB’s] custom RC controller running the same microcontroller. It sends commands to the speed controller that runs the Lizard’s brushed DC motor from a 3S lithium-polymer battery.

The final product looks sleek and handles well. It also achieved a GPS-verified top speed of 48 km/h as per [TRDB’s] testing. We’ve seen some other great DIY RC cars over the years, too, like this example that focuses on performance fundamentals. Video after the break.

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Ender 3 Pro Gets A Second Job As A Stator Winder

June 2, 2025 by Lewin Day 10 Comments

Sometimes, you find yourself in need of a coil. You could sit around winding thousands of turns of copper wire yourself, but that would be remarkably tedious. Thus, instead, you might follow the example of [OJengineering] and choose to get a machine to do it for you.

This build first popped up on on Reddit, with [OJengineering] explaining that they had repurposed an Ender 3 Pro 3D printer to wind a stator for them. The reasoning was sound—a replacement stator for their motorcycle cost $1000 in their local area, so rewinding their own would be much cheaper. The idea was straightforward enough—the 3D printer was a capable motion control platform that really just needed to be retooled to drag wire around instead of squirting hot plastic. In a later update, they explained that they had created a Python program that spits out appropriate stator winding G-code from user-entered parameters. This G-code commands the 3D printer’s head to make rectangle winds around the stator core while moving up and down to appropriately distribute the wire. The device can be seen in action in a video on YouTube.

It’s a hacky build, but one that does nevertheless get the winding done. That’s the thing about 3D printers—they’re really just simple motion systems that can do whatever you tell them. You just need a way to generate the right G-code to do the job.

We’ve featured some other nifty coil winders before, too. Video after the break.

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Testing Brick Layers In OrcaSlicer With Staggered Perimeters

June 1, 2025 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

The OrcaSlicer staggered perimeters in an FDM print, after slicing through the model. (Credit: CNC Kitchen)

The idea of staggered (or brick) layers in FDM prints has become very popular the past few years, with now nightly builds of OrcaSlicer featuring the ‘Stagger Perimeters’ option to automate the process, as demonstrated by [Stefan] in a recent CNC Kitchen video. See the relevant OrcaSlicer GitHub thread for the exact details, and to obtain a build with this feature. After installing, slice the model as normal, after enabling this new parameter in the ‘Strength’ tab.

In the video, [Stefan] first tries out a regular and staggered perimeter print without further adjustments. This perhaps surprisingly results in the staggered version breaking before the regular print, which [Stefan] deduces to be the result of increasing voids within the print. After increasing the extrusion rate to 110% to fill up said voids, this does indeed result in the staggered part showing a massive boost in strength.

What’s perhaps more telling is that a similar positive effect is observed when the flow is increased with the non-staggered part, albeit with the staggered part still showing more of a strength increase. This makes it obvious that just staggering layers isn’t enough, but that the flowrate and possibly other parameters have to be adjusted as well to fully realize the potential of brick layers. That said, it’s encouraging to see this moving forward despite questionable patent claims.

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