Last time I left you hanging on the edge, seats, Me running to the door when the doorbell rings. Unfortunately, it was not my printer being delivered. It was however the curing/cleaning station.
I didn’t touch on this piece of hardware last time, so let me catch you up. After the printer has finished printing, the item is still not 100% ready. We need to take a few steps after printing to get the thing to the thing it always wanted to become.
First off, it needs a bit of a wash, it’s been sitting in this toxic resin pool for the past 8 hours and it would like to not be a toxic mess anymore. Some resins allow you to clean your item with just water. But, most resins aren’t like this, they need a nice, hardcore bath in a tub full of Isopropyl Alcohol (IPA, not the beer). It sounds more complicated than it really is. I recommend always using gloves when handling both the resin as well as the IPA. Once your thing has been washed and you’ve removed all the supports of the model, you then need to cure it, again. Sounds weird, but the printer doesn’t cure it fully, this is to allow you to remove the supports and things, so it needs to go for another few minutes in the sunbed. You can do both the washing and extra curing with Tupperware and a cardboard box covered with foil. If you wanted to, you could also leave it outside in the sunlight, but it will take a lot longer than a couple of minutes.
Since I prefer to use my Tupperware for lunches and I’m not one to throw my cardboard boxes away, I decided we needed a wash and cure station. Essentially, it’s a Tupperware with a rotating base plate and a UV light all built into one, but I like it. So I bought it.
It was a good thing that the resin and printer had arrived by the afternoon. So I was prepared. Prepared to tackle the world 3D printing.
With all the information I gained in the weeks I waited for my stuff, I felt like Tom Cruise from Edge of Tomorrow. I was suited up and ready to fight, with no experience, but I knew who I would be facing. I probably expected death, or at the very least, a loss of fingernail.
I brought all my new gadgets, which were all fancy, to a location that was secret and unnoticed by anyone else, then told my friend we needed to unpack. We took everything out as fast as we could, and basked in our newly-acquired treasure. We set it all up in its location and then tried to plug it all in, nope, it’s an international plug. We just went to the store and bought a converter. We finally got everything in place at the secret laboratory. Barbs aunty, after 45 minutes I had followed the instructions exactly (first-time for everything).
I used the software (Lychee Slicer), which was used to set up the print, and applied the resin settings I learned from a specialist in the field. I then printed the first print that everyone should do. A calibration print is what you’d expect! Ameralabs was the one I selected. It was the one that seemed to be most well-tested and explained.
You can check the location of the application by spinning it around. Guess? I guess? I plugged in the USB stick, browsed through the menus, selected our test print, and pressed that magical print button. The machine started kicking into life as if we were in Disney movies.
It was at this moment we realised that we didn’t have the aforementioned gloves, clean-up extras and containers to store all our things. With 35 minutes remaining on the printer we raced back to the shop to pick up all the items we needed. We all gathered around the printer like little granny’s to watch it finish. Butterflies were swarming in our stomachs.
The first print we made was revealed when we lifted the lid off the printer:
I must say that all the instruction following and weeks and weeks of prepping really paid off here, because our first calibration print was so damn near perfect that there wasn’t really anything we could do except print some more! My printing collaborator already had in mind a set, an army standing on their heads of terriers. They are whittle cuties, wielding their swawds and shiewds!
BEHOLD! BEHOLD!
We were extremely impressed. The print time was a little longer than I had hoped for, as I was just ready to print the world, but we would later find out that this impatience would be the downfall of the whole operation…
Next week, we will be sharing more on our 3D printing adventures.