Lots of good advice here and I am not THAT old but here are a few things I wish I had realized sooner in life (in no particular order or theme):

• No one really knows what they are doing, more experienced people usually have just made the mistakes already.
• There is a difference between being correct and getting someone to agree you are correct, the former is the most important and the latter is not always possible or desired and when to argue and when to let someone be wrong is a skill that takes practice.
• The less time spent worrying about what other people think of you the happier you will be and the easier life will feel. In almost all situations you spend more time thinking about whatever it is than the other person does.
• Always strive to be a good and like-able person but always remember that it’s impossible to be liked by everyone, sometimes people just won’t like you and that is okay.
• One friend you can count on is more valuable than 100 acquaintances, guard and nurture your valued friendships like your life depends on it because it might some day.

The biggest thing though, there isn’t one correct way to live your life and anyone telling you differently is probably selling you something. Always try to learn something from every situation and you will be fine, mistakes are a part of life. Anyway, hope at least some of that is helpful!

All of the advice here is great but that is a Bambu printer, you should run its calibration routine again I would say and see what it says it also should be able to compensate if the bed is warped if you tell it to do bed leveling (unless the A1 doesn’t do that, I think it does though).

Also, when you say collisions is the printer colliding with itself or the part? You can also run an homing routine and manually move the hotend around to see if it has issues.

Also RE the local event, is the air temp really hot where you are? You might need extra part and hotend cooling if the ambient temp is like 40C or something. I mean like tweak the slicer not put an external fan on it necessarily hah.

It’s funny you say that, I have one of those but he actively demands that I turn the water on so he can drink from it hah!

He definitely has enough water bowls around including directly next to that sink, he has done that since he was a kitten. No idea why, I just work here :D

In case anyone here doesn’t follow it, Ivan’s YouTube channel is awesome, he has been working on a crazy marble clock: https://youtu.be/K3FMVmAte3g

ProperPrinting is also great, he has some cool videos on custom extruders and printers he designed and a wild extruding resin printer with UV lasers.

In addition to what others have said there is an interesting video from Veratasium about that NIST department, they have a wild variety of items.

In addition to everyone’s suggestions, have you tried rotating the part so it is at a 45 on the bed? This will keep the printer from accelerating as much in the Y direction since it is not a straight motion, I used to have to do that for tall prints on my Mk3 sometimes.

Also, if I were printing that part I would flip it over unless there is some reason you can’t. You might also get more rigidity using normal supports for the large surface facing the bed, might print faster too, tree supports for large areas take a while for me usually.

Have you ever dried this filament? Silica beads won’t dry out filament, they will just keep the air in the box dry. I have definitely had to dry filament from the factory, especially PETG.

Just to add what others have said, the temp you dry at is as important if not more important than time and different for each type of plastic. If you don’t have it hot enough (typically near the glass transition temperature of the plastic) then the moisture is not able to escape the plastic.

Cool project as well, I have wanted to do the same!

Ah yeah that is good, just making sure because it has caused me a lot of strange issues hah.

One thing that prob doesn’t matter but I usually dry PETG at 55 or 60, not sure how much of a difference that will make, 51 might be warm enough though. From what I have learned, it has to be warm enough that the moisture can escape the plastic (usually just below the glass transition temp) so you might try turning it up a bit if nothing else works because the moisture might not be escaping.

A lot of good avi e from others but definitely don’t discount drying it out, especially if you live somewhere that the air RH is over 20% as it will definitely suck it out of the air and act all kinds of odd in my experience.

Lots of good recommendations here, my usual recommendation is that if you want 3d printing for a hobby to get a Bambu or similar because they just function out of the box for basically all materials. If you want 3d printing to be the hobby then a Prusa or Voron as others have said, way more tinkering to be had. Both are lots of fun though!

I found this diagram on SO at one point but I can’t find the post and it is the best explanation I have found for how all of the files work for bash and zsh, each color is an individual path of execution (eg, follow the red line).

Bottom line though, it only really matters if you are overriding something that is already defined, for example I tell my users to use zshrc and I provide defaults and common things in zprofile because zshrc is executed last when they login.

Hah now this is a great shower thought, if you want some existential dread you should watch this video from Kurzgezagt video about it called You Are Not Where You Think You Are about this idea, it’s great!

Do you live in WI? I am from there and that sounds like the most Wisconsin sentence ever haha!