Hit 500 printed parts for a project and realized I was doing it wrong

I was working on a small gear assembly for a local maker group, printing each piece on my Ender 3. After the 500th part, I finally noticed a tiny design flaw in the support structure that was adding 15 minutes to every print. I fixed it in Fusion 360, and the next batch printed 20% faster with less material. Has anyone else caught a simple design mistake way later than they should have?

3 comments

3 Comments

knight.anna22d ago

Remember doing that with cable management holes on a project box. Drilled fifty of them before realizing I could group the holes in the CAD model and just copy the pattern. Spent hours on something that should have taken twenty minutes. It's crazy how you can stare at a design for weeks and miss the obvious fix until you've wasted a ton of time.

juliadavis22d ago

Ugh, I feel this in my bones. I once spent an entire weekend manually placing dozens of screw holes in a 3D model for a bracket, one by one. My brain just refused to see the pattern. It wasn't until I was done and looked at the mess that I remembered the circular pattern tool exists. The worst part is you know better, but you're so stuck in the grind you can't see the easy way out. It's the most frustrating kind of learning.

grant56912d ago

My buddy spent three days hand coding CSS for a table layout. I walked over, pointed at the grid button in his editor, and his face just went blank.