Thanks for the feedback!

I’m pretty happy with the transparencies tbh. Although on mine, there seems to be two sides, one that gives a fuzzy dirty effect with a lot of stray toner around the actual print (looks like static), and the other side that gives perfectly crisp prints. Unfortunately I can’t really tell the sides apart.

Apart from that small speck of dust that prevented the transfer at the top left of the logo, the sheet came out perfectly clean, the totality of the toner was transferred to the dial. For PCB transfers where you could probably keep the sheet intact (I had to cut mine to fit between the applied indices), that would also mean the sheet would be almost indefinitely reusable.

Thanks <3

If you can clamp a whole PCB on the bed, that’s a perfect application ;)

Here you go ;) https://lemm.ee/post/35636122

I 100% agree with you, a professionally made dial is a work of art and should be absolutely perfect at any magnification. This is just a fun, cheap summer watch project for my own enjoyment ;)

The best looking alternative would have been to have the logo made by electroforming. They look perfect and very professional. Unfortunately the MOQs are usually quite large and therefore expensive, I couldn’t justify spending half the price of this project just on a logo (even if I had enough spare logos for several lifetimes).

Ah perfect timing indeed.

The key takeaway indeed matches yours: it’s not a Voron despite being heavily inspired by it, there are some annoyances but at this price point it’s forgivable and most of them seem to have workarounds (someone in the comments suggested letting the machine fully soak heat before performing Z-offset calibration), the open-source nature might bring a lot of third-party upgrades in the future.

Also, the reviewer’s unit has some abnormal wear on the belts. Does it match your experience?

All in all, it seems to be a decent budget CoreXY printer with a very large volume at 1/3 the price of an LDO Voron kit + PIF parts, with a much quicker assembly but some potential pitfalls.

If this eventually becomes the Ender 3 of CoreXY printers that can be frankensteined into a a much higher quality printer over time, I’m all for it.

Than you so much for such a detailed analysis!

For reference, I’ve had a (heavily modded) Creality Ender 3 V2 for a few years, and I’ve hit a limit in terms of speed and quality.

The filament path between the extruder and hotend is poorly-constrained, making it a pain to load The auto-z calibration is often just a smidge off It uses a custom nozzle/heater

If it’s possible to install a Stealthburner instead of the standard extruder/hotend combo, it might solve most of these issues. Maybe some people are working on a V6 or Mk8 style hotend (I have a metric fuckton of Mk8 nozzles laying around)…

The fans are absurdly loud. All of them.

OK Noctua upgrades then. Compared to an already absurdly loud Ender 3, is it worse?

The mainboard is effectively a BTT CB1 and Fystec Cheetah on a single board Their software customizations are of dubious quality

Would a Voron-style mainboard + RPi + standard Klipper solve these issues or are there fundamental incompatibilities?

Thanks!

My ADHD brain panics if I need to catch a scheduled train and if I’m not actually there at least 1/4h in advance I melt into a puddle of anxiety.

But city trams and metros are absolutely fine. If I don’t catch this one, there’s gonna be another one in a few minutes. No worries.

Busses that are scheduled every half hour at most drive me mad tho. Did I miss it because it was 10 mins early because fuck schedules or is it gonna be 15 mins late?

Public transport in Europe is often in a sorry state, but trust me, it’s nothing compared to the US. Here in France, a lot of regional trains are very unreliable at best but at least high speed trains on dedicated tracks are fine (very expensive, but ok).

I don’t remember UK rail to be a shitshow and/or that expensive but my only experience is going to/from central London to/from neighboring counties and it was fine.

But in the US, oh boy. About 15 years ago I was living with some roommates in Campbell, CA and we went to SF one day. 1h drive mostly on shitty concrete motorways, including probably around $5 of gas. They were heading north for a romantic getaway so I went back to Campbell by myself. It took almost 4 fuckin hours, on maybe 4 or 5 different private companies, and cost me like $25 to get back.

Public transit in the US is so fucked up im almost convinced it’s by design.

True coffee experts chew the beans raw and let saliva enzymes digest the starches.

I mean, almost all coffee that’s not freshly ground and brewed in a perfectly clean machine is rancid anyway. I know people who actually associate this taste with coffee itself, and won’t enjoy a cup until their moka pot has been “properly seasoned”.

Your grandma’s drip coffee? Rancid. From the vending machine at work or in a gas station? Rancid. Every single preground package at the store? Rancid. From your brother-in-law’s $2k bean-to-cup machine? You guessed it, rancid. The 10yo nespresso you salvaged from a friend to bring at your desk? Boy you don’t wanna know how much crap gets trapped inside over the years.

Tons of oils. And the darker they’re roasted, the more the oils come out and get exposed to oxygen and get rancid. Once you identify the smell, you can’t unsmell it. These oils stick to everything, especially plastic coffee drippers.

The “break room smell” I’m referring to is the lingering, heavy, overpowering stink of rancid coffee clinging to everything in a break room where the 20-year-old company dripper have gurgles along every morning, that has never seen any cleaning more advanced than a quick rinse of the glass jar.

Rancid oils? Like a “break-room-at-11am”-flavor?

If all the coffee shops in your area serve unbearably sour espresso, there might be 2 possibilities: either all of them suck and can’t properly extract a light roast, or you might be hypersensitive to acidity. Personally, I love acidity and I enjoy fruity, pleasantly acidic espresso as much as sweet, chocolatey shots, but I get that for a lot of people, “coffee” tastes burnt and bitter.

Coffee is naturally acidic. Very acidic. Acid compounds are also among the fastest to extract. The lighter the roast, the harder it is to extract most of the coffee, therefore light roasts tend to be more acidic than more heavily roasted beans. Light roasts are all the rage ATM because they respect the beans’ origin and characteristics and highlight rather than hide the specificity of high quality beans. The more you roast, the more you lose the original character of the beans and get burnt flavors (this is why most commercial coffee is heavily roasted, the more you burn it, the more you hide the flaws of you cheap, commodity shitty beans).

Espresso extraction follows a curve :

• First drips: salty and very thick
• under-extraction: sour and thick
• sweet-spot: sweet, chocolaty and syrupy
• over-extraction: bitter, watery.

Since roast levels affect the ease of extraction, the same ratio on a light roast and a dark roast will be wildly different. a 2:1 ratio for a light roast would be still way under-extracted, therefore a longer ratio should be used to get some sweetness to compensate for sourness, and get a slightly acidic shot (2.5:1 to 3:1 ratio should be fine). Dark roasts will overextract much quicker and get bitter much sooner, and therefore should be shorter to be palatable. A medium roast should be in the Goldilocks zone at a 2:1 or slightly longer ratio.

TL;DR: ask for a longer shot or a medium roast if you want less acidity and more sweetness and chocolatey flavors, a traditional dark roast blend with up to 20% robusta if you enjoy old school bitter espresso, or drown it in dairy, sugar and spices.

I fuckin love vinyls, they’re beautiful, fragile, tangible, massive objects, but this is bullshit propagated by audiophile circle jerk who believe they need to break-in their $100000 solid gold oxygen-free gluten-free audio cables to properly align electrons.

Most proper denim pants are sized in inches, even from non-US countries.

But of course vanity sizing is a thing so a size 36 is closer to 38in unless explicitly specified, and most online retailers provide true sizing in cm anyway, so there’s that.

Short answer: yes

Long answer: I own multiple brewing methods. Aeropress, French press, Turkish… and a Lelit Bianca. Nothing gets me as happy as a double espresso. Nothing beats the taste, the syrupy texture, the pure jolt of flavor in each sip. I bought an Aeropress for travel, and I ended up buying a Flair because I want the same espresso joy when not at home.

My Bianca is an absolute joy to use. I have completely internalized my workflow, making an espresso at home is so natural to me that it’s by far the easiest method. But brewing with the Flair is painful. It’s the least practical method of making coffee I know. And yet, I’m ready to go to such a length just to have delicious espresso when away.

As you can see, I kinda like coffee, but I love, live and breathe espresso.

PETG is almost the same material water bottles are made from. I’ve made a soap holder that gets, by definition, constantly wet in PETG and it’s absolutely fine.

Also, for the price, you gain a lot of fit and finish and sometimes features, convenience and/or workflow improvements. Good midrange products should focus exclusively on grind quality, even if it means lack of features or a rougher workflow.

Depends on what you’re looking for. Do you want drip? Espresso? French press? Manual ? Electric? What’s your budget?

For cheap/low quality electric grinders, most of them are blade grinders: they chop up the beans in very rough sizes, take forever, sound like they’re gonna explode and make terrible coffee. Don’t bother, they’re shit.

Burr grinders come in 2 main “cutting technologies”, conical and flat. Conicals are mostly found on manual grinders, entry level electrics and some medium to high end ones. Flats are much more common on the medium to high end range because they tend to need much more torque and therefore powerful motors. As for the differences between the topologies, it mostly comes down to particle size distribution and the effects it has. Conicals tend to emphasize texture (think thick, syrupy espresso), flats tend to emphasize clarity (flavors tend to be more easily to discern). But they exist in a continuum and burr shape alone is definitely not the only factor.

As for actual recommendations, take a look at James Hoffman’s and Lance Hedrick’s channels on youtube, they have a lot of incredible advice on all kinds of grinders, among other coffee equipment. Be warned though, it’s a very deep rabbit hole :D

My main grinder is a DF64/G-Iota (~400€), and is an absolute workhorse. It’s a mid-range grinder that can be very easily modded to rival grinders more than twice its price, takes standard 64mm flat burrs and can be upgraded with super expensive SSP burrs. I love it. I think the current generation corrected many flaws I had to mod out of mine.

My travel grinder is a conical manual 1-ZPresso J-Max (~150€) that’s so quick it can grind at espresso range at almost 1g/s, with excellent results.

Soaked beans are the next trend you’re a precursor 🤣