Comic Sans typeball designed to work with the IBM Selectric typewriters

> I have not yet printed and tested this exact model!

Sadly that sums up the 3D printable scene perfectly. So many times I’v seen someone creating X for Y but they don’t have Y to test it but “it should work”.

It’s not far fetched though. With careful design, prints often do work on the first try.

Sure. And it's given away for free, so complaining feels wrong.

But is it _too_ much to ask that they print their tweaked version 2 and test it before publishing it?

:sigh:

Yeah, feels a bit like "I'm sharing this code I've written here. I haven't tried to compile it yet, but it should work."

Fair enough, but this isn't that case. They have Y (it's in the first photo) and tested a previous version of the model. The changes are predictable (rotating letters and slight scaling) so I don't think it's unreasonable to be confident and not waste plastic.

Why don’t you print and test it and contribute to the documentation? Too much to ask as well? ;)

That approach does work for LLMs, though.

Works for shipping commercial software!

(Slightly /s)

Amazingly, I think you’re right, but not for (negative) the reasons you state.

I see the 3D printing scene a remix culture where you’re supposed to try new things. If you want something to work exactly for your situation, you might have to do a little work yourself.

In this case, here we have an idea of making new typeballs for IBM typewriters. Here is one post where someone is playing with the idea. At the top of the page, there is a link to a GitHub page for you to adapt it as you see fit.

But then there’s also a link to a new page: https://selectricrescue.org/ where someone makes many more varieties, also with code for you to try yourself.

I see 3d printing much like the world of early open source coding. Sometimes you get a completed project that works out of the box. But often, you’ll have to tinker and adapt it to your exact hardware. Once a new 3d model is shown to be viable, it can be mixed and matched to make something new!

The article says "I tested a previous revision", so this isn't the first go around.

I have, along with some other ones I created from different fonts. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kXnsvYfaF4&t=2160s (it was an aside to a longer Selectric project I did; this typeball project came out around the same time so I decided to make a few of them).

Watching this back, it partially works but some of the letters clearly need their positions adjusted, and some of them seem to have trouble imprinting fully on the page. That's besides the fact that the proportional fonts look pretty weird when printed monospaced.

I didn't really go further with this because the resin printed balls didn't hold up very well. A slot near the hole would always break open, and then the ball would spin freely instead of being indexed like it was supposed to. These days I've pretty much abandoned home resin printing entirely since it is extremely messy, and I've never been able to make parts with it that weren't ridiculously brittle, even with the supposedly "strong" or "tough" resins.

I've used commercial resin prints that Shapeways/Xometry/PCBWAY have and they are a lot tougher, so maybe they would work well.

Looks like the same person made a typeball for Cherokee, and that comes with a picture of the printed output:

https://www.printables.com/model/441262-cherokee-typeball-fo...

So maybe Comic Sans (and Wingdings) will work as well.

They also link a version that works they say. https://selectricrescue.org/

Also includes Papyrus!

He is not the author. The author’s post would still say I’ve never tested this and leave people uncertain about whether it’s actually a viable design.

I feel like as a matter of policy or at least convention, people really shouldn’t be uploading models that they haven’t at least printed. It’s disrespectful.

Published is better than screenshot

> they don’t have Y to test it but “it should work”.

SW development process 101. What are users for ? /s