Planetary Gear Bearing Fondletoy: M2 vs MK4

It’s been about a decade since I made a batch of planetary gear fondletoys:

So I loaded up the same STL in Prusaslicer and made three more:

Both pictures show the same red bearing, done in PLA on the Makergear M2. The other bearings are PETG and PETG-CF on the Prusa MK4 + MMU3.

The blue bearing has about 5 mm of axial play, a bit more than the red.

The gray bearing is PETG-CF and has maybe 1 mm of axial play, which agrees with my original observation that an Extrusion Multiplier of 1.0 results in slightly overstuffed carbon fiber parts. It’s not much and, frankly, produces a better fit in this case, but it’s different than pure PETG. Which should come as no surprise, of course, given that it’s 15% carbon.

The gray-and-orange bearing looks spectacular in person and has about 3 mm of axial play, roughly the same as the red bearing, which you’d expect from overstuffed PETG-CF and pure PETG.

The single-color bearings print in about 1.5 hours and the two-color one weighed in over four hours. Multi-material objects are do-able, but you gotta want the results.

I told Prusaslicer to wipe the orange filament into the gray infill during color changes (per the Wipe Tower doc), but those two gray parts have so little infill as to make no difference:

The wipe tower in that posed photo has a nubbly texture because the filament just gets squirted without regard to anything other than maintaining the basic tower shape.

Seeing things appear on the platform never gets old!