A hotel in a mining town, one of a few contractors stay at when they can’t get accommodation on site. Mining town = lots of alcohol abuse = occasional fights and violence. They’re never well-appointed places, people always come and go with filthy clothes and boots from site so there’s a level of dirt that could never be cleaned. Didn’t care too much about that if the sheets and towels were clean, but the room was on the outside facing the main road and the door frame was recently (and very poorly) repaired after someone very clearly had booted the door in. Slept with the tool bag open by the bed in case the owner of said boots didn’t get the message that the prior occupant had left town.
I was thinking they may have a process like 3D metal sintering, using a laser to fuse powdered metal layers. In the very early days of that technology I saw a small polyhedra frame like a ball. The texture was very granulated and it felt like it would crumble if it you rubbed it between your fingers too roughly. But it was titanium and indeed a lot stronger than its appearance suggested.
This was (obviously) a very long time ago back when people were Frankensteining their own printers from components and off the shelf options were few and far between and prohibitively expensive. When the early adopters were losing their minds on the daily trying to calibrate, level and troubleshoot all the gribbles and gremlins. It was quite a deterrent to entering the hobby. I couldn’t imagine then that the technology would accelerate so quickly, to the point where a first time user can unbox, assemble and be printing accurate and tidy prints in under an hour.
Seeing what is happening with metal and glass printing these days is still blowing my mind. I love that we’re living in a time where there is so much interesting and fun stuff to discover and so much of it is being shared instead of hoarded.