You’ve been given your new fancy resin printer for Christmas you lucky individual you! Did you get your resin? (Check my previous blog posts on advice regarding resins) you’re just dying to start printing those models you’ve wanted! but you have no idea how to do it, so I’ll give you a hand.
I will begin saying that I personally use chitubox but there are many others available such as Photon workshop, Lychee slicer (Lychee) and the Prusa slicer (Prusa) I’m sure there are plenty of others you could use but those are the ones that come to my head immediately. I use chitubox since elegoo seem to have a partnership or something going on with chitubox as they recommend it and supply the basic program with the USB drive that ships along with the printer, only the Saturn 2 8K printer it even has it listed as the slicer software.
That being said if you feel this blog post a somewhat one sided towards chitubox because it’s what I use because I have an Elegoo printer and I’ve had good success with the slicer, and I have no intentions of deviating from either of them anytime soon. so go and download your selected slicer, once you’ve done that come back……
Oh, your back with that new slicer ready to go? But need files to print? You’re screaming to print your new models! But just hold your horses and I’m going to save you a lot of grief! you’re going to want to download a calibration program such as the cones of calibration, there are many other calibration programs you can use but I found this one the easiest to understand and read. So how so I get the cones of calibration? Does it cost money? Is it difficult to set up?
Open up a browser and search engine you choose to use, and type in the cones of calibration and it should offer you pages such as tabletop foundry and thingiverse go to tabletop foundry as they are the author of the file and all the instructions are there on how to get your settings prepped, this will be a trial and error as every printer is different be mindful of the temperature, printers don’t like colder temperatures. I keep mine in my house at approx. 18 – 22 degrees but during the summer times it is kept out in the shed where I will need to recalibrate the cones when I do move it again. I cannot stress enough that the more time you spend on the cones the better your prints will be and less time emptying the Vat and CAREFULLY scraping the failed print of the film without damaging it causing no end of heartache and time wasted. The cones will stick to the plate on most occasions even if it failed so it’s easy enough to just scrape of, adjust your settings and try again.
Once you have your cones at a point where your happy and you’ve adjusted your settings save them as a pre-set incase you accidently change them or whatnot. But now you’re foaming at the mouth to print those models you want, and you absolutely can at this point your print settings are where you want them to be to ensure the best and most reliable print you can muster if you don’t have the files you want or don’t know where to look a google search of what you want to print with STL behind it will usually take you were to you want to go. I’d recommend Cults3D I find them to be more organised and easier to navigate than other sites, but places like thingiverse are also good. Yeggi shouldn’t be ignored as its almost an archive of links to files that may be a bit more difficult to find due to keywords and IP rights.
I should make it clear that I do not support the direct replacement of a ready-made model such as space marines from Games Workshop for example just because it saves you some money and you can stick it to the man! But you have a far inferior looking product and unless you’ve used the ABS resin a much more brittle product. Using a model as a proxy for one that doesn’t exist, refreshing an old horrible model or adding accessories such as fancy bits or a new head or even custom bases for your models via stl’s I have absolutely no quarrel with who so ever and I will never tell you what you’re doing is wrong but I don’t support it and neither will I encourage it. It’s not fair on any of the painstaking hard work that goes into mass production of the models and the quality from the original source tends to be highly greater than anything you can print. But that is my 50 pence on the whole printing debate that is constantly ongoing.
Thank you for this read, I hope you have all had a wonderful Christmas full of laughter and delight and I hope that your new year is just as good.
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