I last left you all hanging on the edge of your seats, me running to the door as the doorbell rang. Sadly, that was not my 3D Printer being delivered. It was, however, the curing and cleaning station.
I didn’t touch on this piece of hardware last time, so let me catch you up. When the printer is done printing the thing, the thing is not really 100% ready to be a thing just yet. There are a few post-printing steps that we need to do in order to make the thing the thing its always wanted to be.
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 are a little bit more environmentally friendly than others and they allow you to wash your thing in just plain old 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). This sounds more hectic than it is, but I would suggest always wearing gloves when dealing with both the resin and 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. Both the washing and the extra curing can easily be done with a bit of Tupperware to wash your thing and then a cardboard box lined with foil and a spare UV light for the curing. Essentially, you could even leave it in the sun if you were that way inclined, it would just take a good few hours to fully cure rather than a few 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. And so I got it.
Luckily enough, the resin and the printer arrived later that afternoon, so I was ready. Ready to take on the world of 3D printing.
Primed with all the knowledge I had gained over the past weeks of waiting for all my stuff to arrive, I felt like Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow, all suited up for battle, the knowledge of the enemy ahead of me, but not an iota of experience and probably expecting death, or, at least, loss of a fingernail.
I took all of my new fancy gadgets to where they would be set up, a secret location unbeknownst to all out there, and told my buddy that we had some unpacking to do. We whipped it all out of the boxes as quickly as possible and basked in the glow of 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. No worries, we just popped off to the store for a converter. Back again at the secret lab we finally had everything on. I spent the next 45 minutes doing exactly as the instructions required of me (first time for everything) and Barbs your aunty, we were ready to print.
I opened up the application (Lychee Slicer) used to set the print-up, applied the resin settings that I had acquired from an expert in the field and put on the very first print everyone should ever do. You guessed it, a calibration print! Ameralabs Towns is what I opted for. It seemed like the most tested and best explained one out there.
After spinning it around the application a few times to make sure it was in the right place? I guess? I loaded up the file to the USB stick and marched towards the printer. I plugged it in, scrolled through the menu, found our little test print and hit that magical print button. The machine started to kick to life like we were in a Disney movie.
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. So, with 35 minutes to go on the printer, we jumped back into the car and raced off to the shops to get all the sundries we needed. Back just in time for the print to finish, we all stood around it like giddy little grannies! Butterflies dive bombing each other in our stomachs.
We lifted the lid of the printer and revealed our very first print:
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 accomplice already had a set in mind, an army of terriers, standing on their wittle tiny wegs wielding shiewds and swawds like the whittle cuties that they are!
BEHOLD! A WIZARD!
We were very 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…
Check back next week for more about our adventures in 3D printing.
