A few product-improvement variety tweaks to the same old stock design that had been deferred since the early days.
One, I bothered to make a curved buttplate for it. Fits all T19 stocks.
Two, switch fences have been added.
I have never accidentally turned my blaster off in combat, but that would not be good.
This is a traditional strategy for guarding switches to prevent them from getting bumped and moved accidentally.
Three, the front edge of the stock body has been chamfered.
And four, the stock body and base have 10-24 counterbored SHCS holes to secure the 1" PVC buffer tube. Insert tube, align stock and base, mark/drill, tap, install fastener. No more friction only nor permanently Devconned stock assemblies where you replace 3 parts if one gets broken or you want to upgrade or mod one.
These inverter covers always had some trouble printing cleanly:
Take a close look at that bottom edge - it doesn't immediately look like a problem, but the fluting comes across the edge at a low angle and the resulting geometry FDMs only slightly better than flaming garbage. These always got some attention from a razor blade afterward and still tended to look like shit and have a horrid jagged edge. Drove me up the walls for over a year, but it's sometimes difficult to bother with minor things like that that have zero bearing on function whatsoever.
Now, there could be a lot done to smooth and de-brutalize the architecture and these covers are a great example, but that's not the idea here. I will do something to that effect as part of a larger remodel that is not strictly part of Model T19 at all, but T19 is what it is, and is going to continue being brutalistic.
Don't like it? Rant time. Design your own mod bits for it or reshell it yourself. I'm not your CAD slave.
The more flak and the more barf emojis on poisonous Discard channels I get about my style from certain toxic individuals who do not design blasters of this sort themselves, attempting to demand that I change my ways for them when they have no interest in running my equipment anyway; the more I shall stick to the brutalism - especially as locals who actually handle and shoot and look at these in person and are my actual customers as a designer besides my own use do not agree given how much demand I am getting. Let's make this clear, I have no tolerance for politics, and no tolerance for assholes, and trying to "community politic" me or being an asshole to me is not going to get anything whatsoever out of me especially when it's about something totally subjective.
The level of entitlement some people have in general toward open hardware/open source designers across the community who release ridiculous amounts of work for free is astounding. I know many of the same crowd dissing the 19 also attacked FDL Jesse for the FDL-2, do not try to deny that shit, and I know he was NOT happy about that either, and you should be ashamed to be a thorn in the side of multiple designers. Rant over.
Printability fix.
Straightforward matter of stopping those two fluting "toolpaths" a bit short to not bust through the edge. Problem solved.
I also started doing printability experiments with various orientations and types of 3D text/graphics on my setup/materials. I have always thought a lot of designers went over the top with text and logos and greeblies, and so I have long resisted spewing badges all over mine. One thing I will ALWAYS do is to release a complete set of badge/text-free part files for every blaster. But I at least want to know the limits and the results of printed-in badges, for more subtle and boring things like model/serial/build date tags if nothing else. So time to do some test parts.
I had had this DIRECTDRIVE badge thingy in mind for a while and it tested both positive and negative text oriented on the side of a part ortho to the bed, and it has some big horizontal overhangs and some fine little features... Good stress test.
Then there's this one:
Tacky and OTT perhaps, but at least one of my personal Things needs a proper snipe at DC motors plastered on the side. I have fond memories of a certain rental Yale reach truck at work that was, like my blasters, fully brushless, and had (you guessed it) these big, tacky, over the top AC POWER badges. These covers make a good test case for bridged negative features facing the bed, and are the most likely place to put "nameplate" type stuff. A lot of people do it on FDL-3 sideplates, but the outside surface on those is a top layer.
Liking the results of both. Pretty much as it came off the machine, haven't even picked out any strings or blobs yet...
I'm surprised how well printing this doesn't fail. Sometimes, FDM is PFM.
And these come out nice and sharp too. Be mindful of elephant footing if you're going to do these sorts of things. Would really look nice as a multimaterial, obviously, if you wanted to do something less subtle like put your username there.
Silly stuff mostly. But the resolution is better than I expected and could easily resolve smaller text.
