A month off, Day 12: Snow and shiny

Friday was the first snow in Minnesota for the season. And while it didn't last into the afternoon, for a brief time it was cold and dark and beautiful. Winter remains one of my favorite seasons.

I had been reprinting a lot of parts for the Voron 0.1, and the last print of Thursday was to start a replacement fan cowl. I saved it for last as the current one is more or less fully assembled and so far, doesn't have any of the cracking which plagued the other parts. Still, I wanted a replacement on hand anyways.

While the part printed successfully, the face of it wasn't the greatest due to the amount of glue I used on the print bed. Fortunately, I remembered one nice thing about ABS:

You can sand it, and it sands pretty well.

Like I did for the mechanical components, I thought about sanding the surface of the fan cowl. This would, however, leave a matte surface that wouldn't look as nice as something smoother. If I had finer sandpaper...which I did. In fact, I had a set of MicroMesh pads commonly used with finishing during woodturning. Sandpaper is sandpaper, thought, right? I grabbed the pads off of the floor and proceeded to polish the surface. The result was amazing; shiny, clean, almost as if it were injection-molded.

Thinking about this further, I had the idea to use a 3D pen I had to add the infill for the logo. The Voron 0.1 models include an STL for the logo, but I found it difficult to print and apply correctly without some advanced trickery. So, instead, I slotted some ABS in the 3D pen, filled in the spot on the fan cowl roughly, and then sanded it flush. While dark, the result is pretty good.

This leaves me with the problem of if I should keep the existing hotend as I had assembled it, or tear it down and replace all the parts with those on the new fan cowl.

I had rented a car that day to run errands -- something which has been extraordinarily difficult as of late. While I got them done in the time allotted, the amount of energy I needed to put into it to get it done just left me exhausted all over again. I spent a lot of my day reading and watching movies, then went to bed feeling guilty.

Outside of The Month Off, it often feels like there's no time for anything. Inside, there's no energy for anything. I keep telling myself i should clean the house, or fix a doorframe, or a cracked floor joist, but the thought of it just leaves me feeling so weary and sometimes, overwhelmed. Everything reeks of burnout beyond burnout. A persistent exhaustion which has grown endemic, leaving little for anything but the most interesting or pressing of tasks.

I'm so tired, all the time.