Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Printable Posable Figure

Getting a 3D printer while working from home has been a great combination as I can easily have prints going throughout the day. I’ve done a lot of “for fun” prints and a couple useful prints, but the one that impresses me most is LUCKY 13.

Before I could ge started with the print, I had to buy some PETG filament. Printed PETG is tougher than the PLA I had been using so far, but it can be a bit more finnicky to print well. My first, and so far only, roll of PLA filament came from Prusa and it has worked marvelously, but since they’re located in Europe, shipping a roll or two of filament is cost prohibitive. I waded into the endless options for filament and ended up choosing Polymaker PETG. It took a few test prints to get it dialed in, but it worked very well on my Prusa Mini.

The downloaded model files for this print were meticulously laid out and they all printed great the first time. I used the gray PETG for the skeleton and blue PLA for the outer skin and face. There were some accessories too which I did in black PLA.

Having done little to no calibration on my printer out of the box, I didn’t know what to expect, but everything snapped together with almost perfect tolerances! The only sanding I had to do was to remove some little fuzzies that were leftover after printing. This figure now sits on my desk and gets repositioned every once in a while using the plethora of different hand shapes and accessories. I got some red PLA and I think I might need to print him a sparring partner!

benmartens April 25, 2022 Maker

Furze Tunnel

Colin Furze is a madman. Many YouTubers talk about burnout, but Colin keeps outdoing himself. He’s built a hoverbike, jet bicycle, and screw tank to name a few. Years ago, he built an impressive underground bunker in his back yard, but for the past couple years, he’s been working on an even bigger project: connecting his house, shed and bunker with a tunnel!

Check out his playlist that goes into all the details, but this is an incredible undertaking. Currently he has connected his pantry to the shed and now he’s heading out towards the bunker. In a recent video he also mentioned that he wants to connect to his driveway so that an elevator can lower his car down into the tunnel. He knows no limits!

benmartens April 15, 2022 Links

Auto Industry Sales By Manufacturer

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

While I don’t have sales data to back it up, I expect that our county ranks near the top of Tesla’s sales list. They’re everywhere. At a stoplight a couple weekends ago, there were five Teslas waiting with me. On the highway, there’s usually at least one in sight at all times. But this area is an anomaly. How well are they selling around the country?

Would you believe me if I told you that in January 2022, in the US, Telsa outsold Volkswagen, BMW, and Daimler? Check out this data from truecar.com.

ManufacturerFeb 2021 ActualJan 2022 ActualYoY % Change
BMW26,39324,024-7.8%
Daimler20,31720,400-1.9%
Ford161,834142,445-16.0%
GM191,846142,574-13.7%
Honda106,32873,949-22.9%
Hyundai50,73551,51015.3%
Kia48,06242,488-2.6%
Nissan86,13859,742-26.5%
Stellantis151,912125,265-7.6%
Subaru48,30044,1587.7%
Tesla21,55040,16595.4%
Toyota184,249158,676-9.2%
Volkswagen Group46,84637,971-21.2%
Industry1,196,0081,002,006-10.4%

Furthermore, while most manufacturers decreased deliveries due to supply chain issues, Tesla almost doubled their output.

Tesla had two factories (Freemont, CA and Shanghai) each producing about 500,000 cars. Their Berlin factory just came online and Texas is right behind. Those will each add around 500k/year more capacity with even more capacity coming later. It remains to be seen whether Tesla has enough supplies to take advantage of all that additional capacity right away.

benmartens April 12, 2022 Electric Vehicles

Tap to Pay

We’ve had “tap to pay” enabled on our phones for a while, but it really came in handy on our trip to Hawaii. The condo had a keypad lock on it, so when we left the room, as long as we had our phones, we were prepared. It got me wondering about all the options I have for paying in most stores:

  1. Swipe the physical card
  2. Tap the physical card
  3. Insert the physical card
  4. Tap my phone

Which one is the safest?

Contactless payments use NFC (Near Field Communications) which is a subset of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification). When an NFC chip gets within an inch or two of a reader, wireless energy is transferred to the chip. It powers up enough to communicate with the reader via a unique encryption key for every transaction. If you’re swiping your card, you’re handing out the same information every time you swipe so if a thief gets your info one time, they are free to use it repeatedly.

Tap to pay has additional safeguards in place too:

  • Transaction amounts are limited, and you’re notified of transactions.
  • Your phone must be unlocked to make a transaction.
  • You are still backed by your credit card company’s zero-liability policy.
  • Less information is shared with the vendor (e.g. no customer name)

If it were possible to use my phone to pay everywhere, that would be the safest option. As soon as I carry a physical card around, I’m opening myself up to more risk. Tapping the card or inserting the chip are good choices if I retain control of the card, but if I must hand it off to someone (like at a restaurant), then I’m adding the risk of a credit card skimmer.

In the end, the credit card companies are the ones bearing the brunt of security breaches and they all recommend contactless payments. They’re not going to recommend something that costs them more money.

For more info, check out this article from Forbes.

benmartens April 8, 2022 Gadgets

Route Planning

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

Tyla has a lot of extended family members in Montana, and a few years ago, we drove to Fort Peck for a fun weekend. When the topic of a Tesla comes up with her family, the question is often asked, “Could you drive it to Fort Peck?” The short answer is, “Yes, but I probably wouldn’t.” The fastest route breaks off of I-90 at Missoula, heads up to 2, and crosses to Fort Peck. The Tesla route planner keeps you on I-90 to I-94 and then heads up to Fort Peck after a final charge in Miles City. It’s 1133 miles instead of 985 miles and it adds charging time too. If you use a third-party route site like ABetterRoutePlanner.com, you can get a little more creative. While not as fast or convenient as a supercharger station, RV campgrounds provide 50-amp service which isn’t too shabby, especially if you’re planning to stop there for a longer meal or overnight anyway. And in a pinch, lots of hotels and shopping centers (even in Montana) have much slower charging, but I wouldn’t rely on that for a trip.

If you look at any of the charging network maps, Montana and the Dakotas are barren except for the interstates. It’s easy to drive across the states but going deep off the interstate gets tricky. This is one of the reasons why we still have a traditional internal combustion engine vehicle. I have no plans to get rid of the truck and it’s always there as an option if it makes more sense for road trips. If you have multiple cars, you don’t need your electric vehicle to be capable of every drive you might ever take.

Ignoring extreme examples like Fort Peck, most of our drives straightforward with the Tesla. The car navigation system predicts battery usage and automatically routes to chargers as needed. One of the longest trips we have planned this year is to the small town of Alsea, OR. Google Maps says it is 292 miles and 4 hours and 42 minutes. If we took the Tesla, we’d have a single 8 minute charging stop along the way.

However, that leaves us with a 10% charge when we arrive at our destination. While I assume there’s a 110v outlet that we could slow charge from, I’m more likely to plan the route to include arriving with enough battery so I don’t have to worry about charging at the destination. Adding that means that total charging time increases (round trip) to 41 minutes spread across three charging stops. I guarantee that the people in the car with me would need more bathroom stops than that anyway.

When we were debating the purchase, I spent a lot of time plugging in our common drives to the Tesla route planner. Most of them don’t require any stops at all, but for the ones that do, it’s rarely more than 20 or 30 minutes of total charging time. It will take a little more planning, especially if someone needs a bathroom break and I try to find an EV charger on the fly to take advantage of the stop, but we’ll definitely be trying it and if it proves to be too annoying, we always have the truck which is a great road trip vehicle.

benmartens April 5, 2022 Electric Vehicles

EV Battery Recycling

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

We hear a lot about cars burning fossil fuels. Don’t electric vehicles do the same thing? Batteries rely on raw materials like lithium and nickel. As more companies make plans to build EVs and as the global supply of these materials is in question since Russia is a big supplier, the prices are already going wild.

Are we trading one resource problem for another? Thankfully, no. While it’s true that as the EV ramp up happens, we’ll be mining materials from the ground, that won’t be the case forever. Those materials can be completely recovered from batteries once their lifespan is over, and there are numerous ways to reuse batteries once they’ve outlived their usefulness for high demand electric vehicle scenarios.

But until a sizable portion of our battery production comes from recycling, there’s going to be a big squeeze on these raw materials. This is one place where Tesla is far ahead of other automakers because they’ve already secured long term supply contracts directly with mining companies and they are producing their own batteries. They control the supply from the ground to the finished product. Other companies can make promises about how many EVs they are going to produce, but if they have no batteries to put in them then their promises are worthless. It will be a challenge for them to overcome Tesla’s current market share while also looking for sources of raw materials at manageable prices.

benmartens March 29, 2022 Electric Vehicles

“Alone” Review

There are a lot of “survival” shows on TV today and they range from educational to completely fabricated but they share one thing: the people aren’t really surviving. Or rather, they are surviving very easily because they have food and supplies. There’s no real chance of anyone dying.

The TV show “Alone” is different (or else they do an exceptionally good job of faking it.) On this show, 10 contestants are each dropped in their own piece of land in a remote area. They all get the same basic items and then they can choose 10 more from a list. The last one to give up wins $500k. Their only contact with other humans is when they have periodic medical checks and somehow they swap out camera batteries and SD cards with the producers. Yes, along with surviving, they have to film everything themselves too. That’s a lot of heavy gear to carry.

It’s amazing to watch as some people tap out on the first night when they realize they are literally camping next to wild animals that can kill them. Others stay so long they get pulled out because they fail their medical checkpoints. Shelter usually goes well for most contestants, but food is always a struggle. The locations include Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Patagnoia, Mongolia, and Great Slave Lake in northern Canada. None of those are hospitable places to try to survive and they always start the season towards fall when everything is starting to die off and get cold.

I started watching the show because TimS got hooked on it and convinced me to try it. I started with season 7 because it happened to be on Netflix at the time, but if you watch, I recommend you start with season 1. (Season 7 is the best one and I think it would be even better if you built up to it to see how good that season’s contestants really were!) Currently Hulu has the first 7 seasons. Season 8 is only available for purchase. There’s also one season of a spinoff called “Alone: The Beast” but it’s not worth watching.

If you’re squeamish about watching someone gut big game with a Leatherman or try to repair a gash in their hand from an axe that slipped, maybe this isn’t your show. But I loved this show and I hope they keep going with it. The psychology of the whole thing was amazing, and I feel like I learned some bushcraft by osmosis.

benmartens March 28, 2022 Commentary

MC Etcher Drag Engraver

For Christmas, my father-in-law gave me the 120 degree MC Etcher diamond drag engraver bit from Carbide 3D. It fits into my CNC router but is used without the router powered on. The tip is spring loaded so that it will have constant pressure with the surface as it gets dragged along. You can drag engrave many different materials so on a trip to Home Depot, I randomly picked out a couple tiles.

My first attempt was making a sign for the reloading bench that my father-in-law was building. I drew up a design with a herringbone background not knowing if it would work. The sound is a bit like nails on a chalkboard, but it worked great! I ended up going over parts of the design multiple times to get a more defined line.

Later I also made a plaque for the garden bench that I posted about before.

I’m looking forward to trying some other materials too. I think a smooth granite tile could make really nice award plaque and some acrylic could be neat with edge lighting. The possibilities are endless and it’s a fun tool to have at my disposal.

benmartens March 24, 2022 Woodworking

The Best Pen

We have a lot of cheap pens around our house. They get collected from random locations and every time I grab one of them, I’m frustrated that they are not great to write with. I heard someone on a podcast mention the Pilot G2 0.7mm gel ink pen and they went on and on about how they threw away every other pen in their house once they found these. Then I randomly heard someone else talk about the same pen a few weeks later. Maybe it was some sneaky social marketing campaign, but it worked and I bought them.

This is now the only pen I buy. I will walk around the house to find one instead of writing with anything else.

(This isn’t a sponsored post, but that is an Amazon referral link.)

benmartens March 21, 2022 Gadgets

3D Printed Volume Knob

We still have a set of Motorola FRS radios that I got about 15 years ago. Elijah and his friends like to play with them, but the volume knob comes off easily. Sure enough, one of the knobs got lost last summer. When it happened, I thought, “If I had a 3D printer, I could make a new one.” Well now I have a 3D printer so I decided to give it a shot. There was an existing model on Thingiverse, but it was the wrong shape for my radio.

I’m a Fusion 360 newbie but I’ve been through I Like To Make Stuff’s excellent Fusion 360 For Makers class twice. It was time to try a design from scratch with no tutorial. It took me about 45 minutes and I’m sure that I did a lot of things the “wrong” way, but in the end, I had a model that looked pretty close to the original. I set everything up with parameters using measurements from my calipers so that if it didn’t fit quite right, I could just adjust the parameters and quickly change the model. The image below is an upside down view since that’s the part that actual matters the most. The only thing that I didn’t match from the original was the curved slope as it rises from the base to the top. I tried to do that a few different ways but gave up for now as it doesn’t make any functional difference.

It took about 25 minutes to print and I figured I’d have to go through a few iterations to get it to fit correctly, but to my shock, it fit perfectly the first time! It is very snug so it won’t be coming off by accident. In fact, it was so good that I printed a second one to replace the knob on the other radio too.

That image shows the original knob on the left and the printed knob on the right. It felt so good to go from idea to physical object in an hour or two! I even uploaded the model to Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5316963. I’ve found so many fun things to use there, I feel good contributing a bit too.

benmartens March 17, 2022 Maker