Well, it’s been another hot second, ya miss me? Jokes aside, here’s the recap of the last three days!

6/21/2026

haha funny number day Anyways, back to CAD fixing! After a quick little script writing for counting words in all the updatelogs (there’s around enough for a small novel, not including anything on the Blueprint site which is actually fully rewritten by the way, so that’s pretty cool!). Oh that’s a big list todo… again, check out the GitHub repo for more details! Anyways, today’s latch day, since, well you kinda need to finalize the latch design before fixing the docking bay…

One spring print later, turns out the original idea wasn’t the best. Apart from being really weird to test (both prints weren’t really willing to stretch, and were really easily stretched beyond its maximum), so new design time! This time with rubber bands instead of springs! Oh yeah, we changed the idea, it’s no longer a top down spring locking thing, it’s more sideways, essentially this idea. (Here’s the original plan, however the space restrictions really didn’t work out…)

6/22/2026

Since the latch design got ready to test… what do you mean it’s not ready… well, yeah, turns out there were quite a good number of oversights in the original version, so two more hours of fixing the structure later, it’s printed! It looked pretty promising, but has its own set of issues. For instance, the slider doesn’t lock since the rails kinda don’t keep it in, the guide does work (which is really good!, but gets a bit caught in a couple areas.

The latch also uses filament for the smaller parts and pivot bits, which is a bit annoying but it alright… though, the rubberbands do need to be pretty strong for this to work. Also, a couple of small adjustments and keeping the pivot upwards so it doesn’t enter the latch the wrong way (it doesn’t work through the bottom path), and needs a bit more alignment stuff, but it’s pretty promising for a prototype!

6/24/2026

What happened to yesterday? Well, kinda got tired after an exam and just kinda didn’t do anything for the rest of the day. Anyways, it’s currently 2:19 AM (not counting this for the time by the way!), so this is technically today’s summary! Basically, we’re behind schedule, so we should probably start printing stuff that’s pretty much finalized (gussets, etc.) and isn’t gonna change anytime soon, just so we can CAD at the same time to speed things up (spoiler, not much CAD work was done today…). However, 22 corner gussets and 4 three way gussets were printed today! 4.95 hours of printing later (including a couple of failed prints), roughly 131.3g of filament was used (not including failed prints)! That’s some scary fast usage…

Also, opened a fresh roll of white filament! Gotta say, I don’t really like the resulting surface finish of the Inland filament (got it last year at Micro Center and never opened it), but it’s probably something with print settings and what not. I mean, I can also print it out in vibrant pink? (that’s the only unopened one I have from bambulab…) I’d probably just use Polymaker or Bambu filament from now on, the prices are all relatively the same at $20/spool. (If anyone has any cool discounts or cheaper but reliable places, I’m all ears!)

Anyways, yeah, quite a lot of writing, wow… anyways, that’s it for now! I think I’m just gonna continue doing logs every couple of days since sometimes I don’t feel like it, but I’ll try to keep up the consistency!

Catch y’all in a bit!