Over the weekend, a new coworker made itself comfortable in my office - a Bambu Lab P1S 3D printer. I've been interested for a while and already dabbled with resin printers for tabletop miniatures, but this is my first (working) FDM printer. (Having owned an Ender 3 Pro with a completely warped structure does not count 😅).
After a short interlude of printing toys for the kids (DUPLO bricks work especially well!), it's time to make something useful. A small fixture for some shades in the children's bedroom broke last year and now I have the power to finally fix it! I measured the replacement part with my trusty calipers (first time using them, too...) and tried to input all of it in Onshape - but for the life of me, I cannot get a grip on this tool. I'm used to working with OpenSCAD and Blender, so strange UX should not be a problem, but I found no way to get the measurements into the software. And I tried everything (besides watching a tutorial video, which I probably should do afterwards 🙈).
Anyhow, opening up Blender, configuring some cubes, adding boolean modifiers and voilà - it's not "good" by any engineering standard, but it should work I guess 🤷🏻
Then, printing with ABS is also a first - Claude was very helpful in figuring out the correct printing parameters and we decided to print three different versions of the fixture to see which one works best.
The print is currently running - I'm excited to see how it will turn out (and if it will break again tomorrow when I close the shades). I will report back in a follow-up note!
Update (2026-06-10)
The print finished successfully and the fixture works! The one printed in an 22.5° angle worked the best, while the flat one had the worst features - there are little teeth on the middle ridge that need to be just the right height to fit. The angled print also mitigates the typical ABS delayering, as the layers are not perpendicular to the forces acting on the fixture when closing the shades.
