A few weeks ago I acquired an Elegoo Mars 3D resin printer. It didn't go well. I had one successful print out of the whole damn lot of tries...and that was a Kodama from Princess Mononoke which is looks like a lumpy potato with limbs.
So I started looking around for help. None was forthcoming. Looked around and looked around and finally found that someone had a bad FEP film (the film at the bottom of the tank that the UV light shows through to expose and cure the resin) and they were failing as a result.
"Gee!" I think. "Maybe that's my problem?" and I go and order a replacement film. Nope...that wasn't it.
Now having failure after failure after failure is frustrating. It's even more frustrating when you try many things and none of them makes the situation better. IF there was improvement...then it would be one thing. But no improvement, nothing to indicate that I'm doing ANYTHING right...I wanted to mail the fucker back to Amazon and buy some more D&D dice or something.
Then I found groups on Facebook. The Beginner's Group wanted to ask me a question to prove that I'm really a person. "How many seeds are there on a strawberry?"
How.
The.
Fuck.
Should.
I.
Know?
I wasn't in a good mindset at the time so I answered the question with "Fuck off you elitist prick!" Naturally I did not get into the group. But with my mindset...I really didn't want to. A reasonable question might have been something related to the 3D printing. Things like "What do you want to print with your printer?" or "What's the most complicated thing you've printed so far?" or something like that.
Nope. Fucking seeds on a fucking fruit. And don't tell me that there are no seeds on a strawberry...I know that what looks like a seed is actually the achenes (ovaries) of the fruit and in a way are mini fruits on their own. But at the time I was pissed at my god knows how many failures in a row, madder than hell at the fact that no one else seemed to have the same sort of failure I did and infuriated at the lack of help available to me.
So I found another group that had a more reasonable question. "What do you want to print with your printer?" I didn't even make my first post when I saw someone posting that they've been having problems with the software. That the most current version of Chitubox (1.6.5) is twitchy and causes problems WITH PRINTING.
So I thought back. I installed what came with the printer which was 1.6.1 and the instant it showed me that there were updates...I closed the program, uninstalled the 1.6.1, and downloaded and installed 1.6.5.
Turns out that 1.6.5 doesn't have the settings profile for the Elegoo Mars and that you need to either have imported the settings from the previous version...or put them in manually.
I put in the settings for my printer that were listed in the booklet...but that was maybe 10 settings out of dozens more that the book didn't mention.
So armed with that bit of info...I removed everything and got and installed 1.6.3 which was the last version that everyone liked. Fuck me if the first print I tried worked. I then introduced myself and said how grateful I was for the help. They offered me even more advice. Photon Validator which is software that checks Chitubox's homework and corrects mistakes. Second print was even better.
Prints since then have been awesome. A few failures, but that's to be expected. The majority have been good prints.
So in thinking about what I want to try printing next...I browsed through the things I downloaded to see what I felt froggy enough to try to pull off. And I found it.
This is stupid crazy and I'm going to go for it.
Rey's Dark Side Lightsaber.
The parts list is insane and so must I be for even wanting to consider it.
But know what? Fuck it. I'm going to give it a try. And since this is so crazy a build, I'm going to blog the shit out of the process.
Wish me luck.
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