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Wish me luck!

Any last minute tips for a first time resin printer? I have at hand nitril gloves, a carbon filter mask and IPA (curing in the sun for now).

Good luck!

Have also at hand paper rolls. You're going to use it like fething water

Yeah, lots of napkins or paper towels!! Try some simple prints at first to dial in your exposure times and support settings - once that is done print away!

Thanks! I will do the exposure calibration prints first for sure. Really doesn't help me that I have a brand new machine there's no knowledge base for online yet

My first real print... probably Man o' War dwarfs.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Thanks! I will do the exposure calibration prints first for sure. Really doesn't help me that I have a brand new machine there's no knowledge base for online yet

My first real print... probably Man o' War dwarfs.

As a general fact, you might wanna go take a look here:

https://dwn.alza.cz/files/infolist/5593793/anycubic_resin_settings.pdf

Those are settings for an original Photon, so as a rule of thumb for the Mars 2 Pro it should be around 1/4th of that.

Since it has the monochrome screen, I might do a 45 second first layers and 3 seconds per layer. You might find on calibration you can go to 30 second first layer and 2 second subsequent layers. They boast a 1 second layer, but I have a hard time seeing that would work.

Good luck!!

I'm testing one out, actually, can attest that for Elegoo abs like skin resin, two seconds per layer at 50 microns with 5 initial layers at 25 seconds work without an issue. Now testing 25 microns at 1.5 seconds per layer, looks ok so far.


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Elegoo ABS-like skin resin works perfectly on the Mars 2 Pro at 0.025mm, 1.5s, 5 starting layers 25s

Sweet! Any predictions on how Elegoo ABS-like Gray might differ?

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Sweet! Any predictions on how Elegoo ABS-like Gray might differ?

They're both non-translucid, so the same settings should work.

So I started my calibration prints at 2.5s figuring it's better to go down than up and indeed at 2s (for 0.05mm layers) is perfect. Had some issues, it's quite the tale for later tonight.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Had some issues, it's quite the tale for later tonight.

...enquiring minds want to know!!

So. The full sordid tale. I feel like quitting right now...

It took me 3 weeks to even negotiate to print at home, on the balcony. Fully enclosed and seemed well shaded to me, but it turned out useless. I could see resin curing as I poured it. To complicate things the Mars interface is dumb and I was rushing and it didn't register me setting my Z=0. So the first print was just it driving the build plate into the FEP until I shut it off and I had a miserable time trying to clean the vat while resin cured before my eyes.

Then, a friend who lives nearby offered to host the printer at his place, and we carried everything there. We got two gorgeous validation prints at 2.5 and 2.2 second exposure.



Some of the missing little strands I knocked off with the toothbrush while cleaning.

Since they both looked a tad overexposed I then just went to print a real file at 2.0 seconds. This was my plate.



What I got was the right side printing more or less fine, while on the left the initial layers stuck to the build plate and the rest was a pancake on the FEP.

Cleaned everything and releveled. By now my FEP is scratched and foggy in places, I don't know how much more it can take. But I cure the okay prints in water in sunlight for an hour or so. While the detail looked perfect when going in the water, after I took them out this white gunk appeared and started spreading from inside corners. I have no idea what this is.



I cleaned everything again, releveled, then arrenged another, similar plate of models, increased lift to 6mm, slowed it to 80mm/s hoping stuff with stick better. When I came back the build plate was tilted and everyting printed sideways. From the looks of it this happened very early on and the only reason I can think of is that suction tilted it. The FEP now also has a few tiny, deep dents from I don't know what. The vat was clean and the resin filtered.

All in all I spent all day cleaning the vat and getting models fail in new and unknown ways. I could use any advice...



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My final settings today




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I also went through like 20 pairs of gloves and a roll of tissues and my hands still stink of resin. Can't believe how messy this is.

Well, OK, it might be a number of things:

- First, if one side stuck ok to the plate and the other didn't you probably should recalibrate your plate, as it seems it's a little bit inclined.
- Those deep dents could very easily break. You really, really don't want that. Do you have any othe vat available? I'll assume not (being your first and all), so you probably should think about changing the FEP.
-Suction: Yeah, it might be that. Are those ships hollow? If they are, they'll be generating suction like a mother. If they aren't, they're still printing a bit area of the full plate per layer, so the tension will still be big. If possible, try to print them at an angle with supports. That should ease the tension exerted on each layer.

Not hollow.

I don't know the math but right now I'm terrified of printing with supports. Even standing on end, the crosssection of the model connected to the FEP will be massively larger than the total crosssection of supports no matter the density...?

Also why do my hands still stink of resin even after I washed them in fresh IPA

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Not hollow.

I don't know the math but right now I'm terrified of printing with supports. Even standing on end, the crosssection of the model connected to the FEP will be massively larger than the total crosssection of supports no matter the density...?

Absolutely yes, without a doubt. It's at an angle, after all, so the actual "shadow" will always be smaller, even if for some reason your supports were to fill all of it.

Also why do my hands still stink of resin even after I washed them in fresh IPA

...huh

DO NOT touch the liquid resin. Your hands should never smell of resin. You need good disposable chemical gloves when working with the liquid resin. It is highly toxic and can cause problems with skin contact.

 Lance845 wrote:
DO NOT touch the liquid resin. Your hands should never smell of resin. You need good disposable chemical gloves when working with the liquid resin. It is highly toxic and can cause problems with skin contact.

I went through like 30 nitril gloves. How can people even do this. It gets everywhere. Just the dripping from a finished print splashes drops all around the vat. There's resin on top of the build plate, no way you're not touching that when you remove models. Now it's on the gloves. Now it's on tool handles.

Practice, mostly. You end up touchig just what you need. Still, I am much fonder of the water washable resin.

You will get better at cleanup, as I just use one glove now and with such little mess I can remove the glove, blow it out and re-use it a number of times. Then I wash my hands in soap and water - do NOT wash resin from your hands with IPA!! That just molecularizes the resin and it makes seeping into your skin that much easier - just good old soap and warm water right away.

One thing I learned is to always put supports with angled bases and never print anything directly onto the plate as removing from the build plate is super easy with a plastic scraper. I was doing prints flat on the bed at first and they would be so hard top remove I scratched my build plate a bit. I do not have that problem anymore no matter how big a model I print.

Of course others have better experiences (and probably a lot more experience) so have no issues.

I use the same pair of nitrile gloves until they break when airbrushing acrylics onto minis.

I only use nitrile gloves a single time when working with resin if literally any resin got on the gloves, which is pretty much every time. I think they're really only designed to be exposed to noxious chemicals for x long.

It gets easier! Practise makes perfect and all that.

Having a really organised workspace helps, you don't want to be trailing drippy resin everywhere so have your cleaning bath as close as possible - if you can't carry it close then use paper towels underneath to catch any drips while you transfer it.

Definitely use supports, with or without a raft it makes life a lot easier when it comes to getting prints off the plate. Even easier if you soak the print and plate in warm water first (even a few seconds will help)

You'll go through paper towels (blue cleaning towels seem the best, it's really easy to see where things have got liquid on them) and gloves very quickly, some have plenty. Once you get used to it all and how to handle things without getting resin everywhere you'll find you use less.

i am a huge fan of those blue shop towels from Autozone or whatever.

Thanks for all the encouragement, guys. Tomorrow I try again, with some normal, supported infantry files this time. I'll have time for 2-3 runs if nothing goes awry.

I'll sound with the same encouragement. I just got my printer a few days ago and had so much trouble getting the test object to print I had to back away from the printer for a couple days before trying again. A lot of what you're going through I had the same exact issues (clean-up is the worst!).

I've now finally had two successful prints of some exo-suit models on my Photon - after about six revisions of building supports for the models and a lot of fiddling with the build plate (zeroing the build plate with the empty resin vat in place, instead of the paper method)

Oh a random perk of the Mars 2 Pro that I forgot to mention is that it comes with side cutters that were ranked #6 for sprue cuting here and cost 20€ on their own
https://www.fauxhammer.com/top-10/the-best-spure-cutters-for-miniatures-models/

I noticed because I had read that review literally a day before unboxing the printer.


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So I took the first run off the plate and I am pretty satisfied. Most of the models had minor failures, but it's things I can understand, like inadequate supports, and the FEP was clean at the end. Looks like I will also have to be more mindful of scale, mst models are a bit too small to mesh with GW.

The one thing I wish they would really add to ChiTuBox is a ruler to measure any determined distance, like set point A and how far away is point B. Seems like it would be simple to add and every other 3D program has it. Sometimes I change the scale in the slicer and I want to make sure the scale is good, as just seeing the overall dimensions are not always helpful.

 MDSW wrote:
The one thing I wish they would really add to ChiTuBox is a ruler to measure any determined distance, like set point A and how far away is point B. Seems like it would be simple to add and every other 3D program has it. Sometimes I change the scale in the slicer and I want to make sure the scale is good, as just seeing the overall dimensions are not always helpful.

Paid version of Lychee Slicer has that. And even the free version combines all the functionality of Prusa and Chitubox in one package, by far the easiest for placing supports!



Alternatively there's a ruler widget on thingiverse that measures model height, relative height at 28mm and 34mm scale and base size. Pretty nice to scale your minis so the eyes are exactly at the 28mm mark or whatever you need.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3649454

I've noticed that the last version of Chitubox has slowed significantly the predefined Bottom Lift Speed and Lifting Speed on the default Mars 2 Pro profile, which if you used the default ones, might have affected your prints, particularly because they were directly on the plate. Maybe that will help.

So I finally supported something correctly! I still had a few FEP pancakes on the same plate tho for other models.



Both files are by mkhand

The stepping on the Chimerae is just me apparently catching a really unfortunate angle on the front plate, it's not visible on anything else.

My first 100% successful plate!



I'd have liked 0.1 or 0.2 less exposure for crispness but this is the price for prints not being ripped apart it seems.

Man o' War lives!