Yes actually. It is a great hot fix for car stuff. With my auto body shop, I always carried a few feet of tie wire and a Leatherman because I often dealt with damaged fresh auction cars that I just needed to get to the shop in one piece.

I worked for some good and some sketchy used car dealers. There were many repairs where the absolute cheapest minimum fixes were required. These were often Buy-Here Pay-Here car lots where the cost is kept low, the cars are not great, and the loans are predatory, but they will finance absolutely anyone. I won’t get into the really bad parts, but these places suck and are a product of the exploitive Republican South in the USA, and target minority communities. Most of their cars get repossessed many times over, and while these are supposed to be auctioned to levey the recovered cost against the loan, there are major loopholes. Like the law is not worded in a way that excludes the previous auction price paid by the owner. It also allows for deductions of costs related to preparing the vehicle for auction and transport… Lots of sleazy stuff happening there.

Anyways… I got the same cars to work on over and over for years from one of those dealers. I often used tie wire to fix trim parts and stuff. It holds better than many actual fasteners.

In fact, when I did pit for a dirt track sprint car, nearly every fastener on the race car has a hole drilled into the bolt shaft above the nut with a bit of this same tie wire pushed through and twisted. Lots of aviation stuff has the same. Cotter pins are a thing. Like your vehicle’s tie rods have a cotter pinned castle nut, which is basically the same thing but a pin that is less prone to corrosion in the long term. Still, tie wire will last years and 50k-100k miles even in bad weather and conditions.

When I repair stuff like a plastic bumper cover that is torn or in pieces, I often used tie wire to stitch align the pieces exactly where I want them. Then I plastic weld repair the back side by embedding the stitched cross part of the wire in a special way. The wire becomes part of the reinforcing structure. Then I clip the wires where they went through from the back, remove the front part of each stitch, and cosmetically repair the crack and stitching holes in the plastic.

“Honey! We’re ready to defend the tomatoes from that evil coalition army of rabbit deer”

I think the only reason I might consider getting a SLA printer in the future is for making buttons, switches, and very small mechanisms. FDM is not very good for these in my experience so far, though I haven’t tried to print them with something like a 0.25 mm nozzle yet. The interface angles and texture have a very large impact on how a button slides into a small button on a circuit board and or is even more sensitive when the printed button is depressing a metal switch dome on a PCB.

Are there any really small SLA printers that have a rigged open tool chain for such an application? I care about stupid-tiny types of things like the buttons on the side of a phone.

On my bucket list is to etch my own 4+ layer circuit boards and make some really small stuff at home just to say I can.

First try or multiple test prints? Did you manually place each tree support on the half cylindrical overhang? Do you think they were needed, given that the top most point of the half cylinder is the same overhang, or am I seeing a tiny bevel at the point where you reduced the overhang corner?

Looks like you’re building a jig or furniture.

The issue in this area is actually that the screens are proprietary from those making them, but that leads to a criminal corporate culture down the line in most cases. The datasheets for most high resolution displays are locked behind nondisclosure agreements and not publicly available.

I support all levels of open source, but that is a personal opinion and not anything mod or community related here. I’m not monolithic in my hobby interests so I expect to put things down and return to them at will. That is not compatible with any subscription nonsense. The SLA space seems dominated by such subscription schemes IMO. Big messy projects or large spaces for stuff are not something I can do, so I am probably biased from that angle too.

CW1 is too pricy for me, but as far as I am concerned it is the only resin printer than exists. All the others are proprietary. So I haven’t looked into them further. Sorry I’m no help. I didn’t want to leave ya with no replies.

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