I like the idea of making this kit significantly more affordable than the well known and absurdly expensive SmartStrings kit. Sourcing and cutting my own tubes was easy.
The 3D printed pieces need some work, though. The holes for the thumb screws were far too small meaning I had to use pliers to get the screws to go into 90% of them. Even with the screw in and out a few times, it was still not easy enough to actually use the thumb screws by hand. This makes adjustability quite difficult and given this is a tool that needs a lot of fine tuning to get mm accurate measurements, that becomes a real pain. Additionally, it means that it's hard not to mar the metal tubing since I have to use a wrench on the screws and I cannot tell when a screw is still held up by the plastic vs. biting into the metal unless I try to move the metal which undoes all my hard work. Now that I'm marring the metal, the concept of easily sliding is out the window. All in all, it made this whole kit hard to use which defeats the whole purpose of it.
Finally, I ended up breaking one of the 3D printed components. This was user error but it did break with surprisingly little force on the first ever use which makes me think these need to be printed with stronger material to be fit for something that I'd use for years.
End of the day, I spent a lot of money when considering the tubing was $150 and it's all going in the garbage.
P.S. Thumb screws pictured look much better than what I received. My fingers were burning for a couple days from the small, hard to grip thumb screws.
