[rescue] Wanted SS5/20 disk bracket, UK preferred

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Mon, 9 Aug 2021, Dave McGuire wrote:

>  There's a whole lot of this going on; take a look on Thingiverse.

Thingiverse is hateful.  For the longest while, they blocked any
downloads from browsers with adblock enabled.

It's also really over-"engineered" for this purpose.  We're
duplicating/archiving things that already exist.  Each of those things
has an OEM and a part number.  The URL practically writes itself (cf.
bitsavers).

>  I do a lot of replacement part design these days, usually in OpenSCAD
> but more recently in FreeCAD, targeting an FDM 3D printer workflow.

I was a huge fan of OpenSCAD when it first came out.  Using it was like
using POV-Ray again for the first time in 20 yeasr.  Designing parts
using CSG and then asking a slicer to turn it into G-code feels like
magic.  But OpenSCAD has some really leaky abstractions in how it
realizes primitives.  One has to declare up-front how many line segments
are going to be used to approximate the outside edge of a cylinder, for
example.

FreeCAD is a bit better.  It still has some really curious rough edges
in terms of describing things like gemetric prisms or extruding a 2D
shape along a path, but it seems far more hackable--even in place, from
the Python prompt.

I've heard Blender is better than both in terms of deferring
quantization to the very end of the pipeline, but the last time I used
Blender (a long time ago), it didn't seem like anything I'd ever want to
use for precision work.

> It's a great capability to have.

It really does feel like magic, being able to measure something, sketch
out an idea, and hold it in my hands a couple hours later.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
Austin, TX
USA