Print that sucker

Hello World.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I've typed that. I could probably afford a seafood dinner. Possibly for an army. 

A lot's happened in the past week or so, and not much of it HAM related. 

I got my first COVID jab since they dropped the age down to the 40s, and my second is booked for the end of the month. The only side effect for me was my arm being ready to drop off for about 2 days after it. Possibly the logic of having it jammed that close into a shoulder that already has calcification and bursitis given it already hurts might have not been as smart as it seemed at the time. 

The return to full time work from home has been a struggle; I had a lot of momentum built up being back in the office 3 days a week, and the steam has gone out of a lot of those things. Still, there's progress. It's just slow.

I've spent way too much money of late, though it's benefits are evident. 

I had a large storage array at home - with some 36 hard disks all handling the bulk of my media storage. The problem with these is that they were across 2 shelves and 2 arrays. Those arrays were nearly always active due to various processes that run. And they were quite simply - expensive - to run. One shelf alone was pulling around 100w without the disks spinning, and well over 300w when they were. 

Having sold some stuff on eBay, I was able to fund a couple of new hard disks, and I grabbed a couple more that I'll be paying off. I can't look at that total as a whole number. What I can however look at is the power bill. I have monitoring on my meter, and the first significant thing is the average of $2 per day that our usage has dropped. Ignoring the disks I paid for from sales, the ones I've had to spend new money on will be cost recovered in around 9 months. That's a significant. The fact that it's also a lot quieter in the garage is something of a bonus. 

I've ordered a Creatly Ender 3 3D printer. Not particularly expensive, and something I've had to rearrange everything to make space for, assuming the XYL doesn't kill me when she sees it.  I'm not planning to get too carried away with the whole thing; it's intended to serve a functional purpose. I have amassed a handful of plans for things I'd like already - paying someone else for those things would cost more than the printer, so this is the cheaper option. And when I get around to it, I'll start to get my head around doing my own designs.

High on the list is a new bracket for the Xiegu G90. At the moment the head is mounted on a block of timber on my desk, and the bulk is mounted under a shelf. I don't like any of that set up. New stand is at a good angle and facilitates a fan underneath. I'd like it to sit on my "radio shelf" next to the IC-706. The bottom mounted heatsink doesn't facilitate this without a bracket. 

I'd also like a stand for the little USB mixer that I use to combine the audio from both radios and my PC to output through a single set of speakers. At the moment it's laying flat and too far away to see. Getting it upright on a decent mount will give me options. 

Eventually I'd like to create plans for all of the plastic pieces from my RC car that don't have aluminium options available - and there are a few. With shipping, even the $10 bits become expensive, and the model has long since been discontinued, so there's no guarantee that I'll get them much longer.  I haven't been able to find plans for most of those parts, so I suspect I'll need to work out how to create them myself. High on the list will be new bumper bars. I've been waiting for ages for a new one, and the ETA is the end of June. They're hard to come by.  I'd prefer to replace as much plastic as possible with aluminium, but not everything is an option. 

I'm over the need for AA batteries too - the sets of Ni-MH batteries I have are a constant let down. The only alternatives I can find don't fit in the existing battery box, so fabricating something new will be necessary to accommodate.  

There's a million little uses I can think of for this thing, but the first challenge will be assembly. A well regarded printer at $300, and the first hurdle is the fact that it comes flat packed and requires getting fairly intimate with it to get it working. 

I hadn't really considered it seriously before but I started looking for plans before I committed to the printer. There were things I'd seen printed before that I want and there are things I went looking for to solve problems, annoyances and otherwise make my life easier. Once I'd passed about a dozen items, it was clear that a more rational thought process is "can I afford NOT to have one?".

It seems to be useful for so many things that it's worth pursuing. The 3D printing communities seem to range from those who print for the sake of it, to those who see it as a useful tool to aide in doing other things. HAMs and other electronics enthusiasts appear to be pretty well represented in these groups. Some of the designs people are coming up with are genius. If I could fabricate new parts for my sons Transformers every time he breaks a leg or an arm, that'd make me happy enough. 

Radio time really hasn't been high on the agenda this past week or so. The return to working from home full time has kept me at my desk all day, and sitting there in the evenings to play radio has not been of interest - I discovered a new TV show recently that the XYL has taken a liking to (something that rarely happens if I like it), so my presence has been required elsewhere. I do keep an eye on SSTV when time permits, particularly during the day. If FT8 on 15m happens to be going off I might jump in for a few minutes, but with this weather at the moment it's just as likely to be dead for DX.  I'm usually happy if I can get a couple of FT8 QSOs done in a week at the moment.