Another day of testing the printer… As I said I would I bumped up the cure time to 9 seconds. and it does look a bit better. The problem is that I printed different miniatures to last time.
So from left to right we have:
Male villager
Town Guard
Female villager
Lounging bloke
Female villager
Lady of ill repute.
I found the reason for my layer shift today… a simple case of user error. If you look at the photo below… you will just about see a nut above the Anycubic logo. The twice I have forgotten to tighten it fully then I got a shift.
You can really see it with the two koi below…
So note to self, I will need to ensure that the nut is tightened. It doesn’t matter really with these supportless miniatures, but when I move onto supports then a layer shift can cause a right pain I would imagine.
One other thing of note with these is that these bases are an absolute sod to get off the plate. For the next lot I am going to put a little gap under the edge of the base to allow a blade to fit in easily.
Today I spent a good while adding bases to miniatures in 3D builder. I found the bases on Thingiverse, but sadly forgot to note down the designers name, I just went and found them as credit, where credit due…
So I ended up adding eighteen I’ll Gotten Games miniatures onto the Ecaroth bases and these are the first half dozen.
So here we have:
Fishmonger
Alchemist
Jailer
Blacksmith
Courtier
Farmer
These six took 2hours 48 minutes to print. Now personally I think I should have cleaned them a bit more, but let’s say 3 hours tops plus curing time.
Now with these I dropped the layer curing time from 8 seconds to seven to see if it was over exposing. Next lot I will bump up to 9 seconds and see if there is a difference (the first lot were done on stock settings of 8 seconds per 0.5 layers.
I would have done some more today, but my eldest snaffle the laptop for her Zoom singing thing, so I will resolve at 9 seconds tomorrow.
In terms of resin usage, they came in at around 30 grams, so hardly anything at all. I checked the resin and actually I bought plant based, which was what I was originally going to get. This states it can be washed in soapy water.
Tomorrow I will carry on with my first steps…. someday I am going to have to add supports 😱.
My next rock group name … Resin People and the Undead.
So today, after my successful first print I decided to have a go at some miniatures. These are some of the Ill Gotten Games Townsfolke.
As I said I would, I went and washed some in ISO and some in meths. I printed a single mini too which I washed in soapy water.
So what do they look like?
The details are quite soft on the faces, I think that this is under exposure as the print cures. I will need to dial things in a bit and re test.
But anyway, the ones on the left were washed in ISO and the ones on the right in meths. Not to be honest I can’t tell the difference at first glance. They were all put outside in the sun and left for a few hours then taken inside and put under the lamp.
As mentioned I also printed another milk maid and this time washed her in soapy water. Once washed I coated it in washing up lights and rubbed it in, then rinsed off and threw it under the lamp (it was dark by time she was ready).
This is where things got interesting….
The one on the left is the one done in water and the other is the one done with ISO. Now they are definitely different colours under the light. One has just gone under the light the other has been outside and then spent a few hours under the lamp.it will be interesting to see if they both end up the same colour this time tomorrow. The others look dark as they were out of the direct light source.
Disco Milk maids
I also managed to get my Undead up to the basing level. Hopefully tomorrow I will get them done and onto the next thing.
Today has been a busy one, but I managed to get some painting done as well as working with resin with the kids.
I got the undead a bit further forward as well as finishing the ogres and the cart and draft oxen (I just need to find the wagons now).
I also found my 6mm Arabs from WW1. They are painted so I just need to do the Turks and I am laughing 😉.
The kids made some more resin pieces, but I also bit the bullet and got a start on unboxing the printer…
Guess what is in here?Levelling with paper… I can do that.
To level it you place a piece of paper on the base, and click a button. The printer plate moves down and when it is right down one simply tightens the four silver bolts d voila… press another button to tell it that it is zeroed in and that’s it… ready to print.
All it together and ready to go… I put the square against it so you can see the rough size of it.
I had to print the test cube as I actually couldn’t work out how to slice the bits I wanted to print. Sadly you will have to wait until tomorrow before seeing what it looks like. I am pretty impressed so far as I could never have done it on the Ender3.
Like the Ender it tells me the print time and the amount of material used. I evidently put way too much resin in the holder. Luckily I can reuse the stuff that doesn’t cure. I can run it through a fine sieve and then put it back into the bottle.
This is the start of a very large learning curve as this thing can make hollow prints to save on resin, these hollow prints need plug holes adding to allow the interior liquid resin to escape.
Now I bought grey resin as it seemed a good idea at the time, however having done a bit more research (aka watching YouTube) it is suggested that clear resins might be better as it allows the UV light to pass through the object and cure it faster.
I have got myself a couple of pots, one with ISO in and the other with meths. Again watching YouTube people who can’t get ISO easily were using meths to clean the prints before curing. Tomorrow I will print a couple of Milk maids off and give each a go in the different liquids. I have seen some people use hot water too, so perhaps that will be a third one to test.
Print comes off the plate in 20 minutes or so, so wish me luck!
Bogenwald 