To 3D Print or Not to 3D Print Part I

Should I buy a 3d printer?  I have asked myself this question dozens of times, usually after I saw some amazing project on the web.  I debated this internally for quite some time.  My biggest hurdle was would I use it enough to justify the investment?  I struggled with this for a very long time, to the point that my amazing wife got tired of my relentless debating and bought me one for my birthday a couple of years ago.  I truly don’t deserve her!  I thought I would relate my experiences so far. 

Now I’m no Luddite but I’ve also never dealt with anything like this before.  I have a Creality Halot 1 which is a lower end entry level type of resin printer.  I think that they have a higher resolution one out now that is less than what I spent on the Halot 1.  Assembly and preparation was a piece of cake, there was very little for me to do.  I followed the directions and did the adjustments and got it ready to fire up.  I got some resin along with the gift, so I poured it in and found a file to print.  I thought I was ready but after the first of many failed prints I realized I needed to educate myself.

I wont go into a lot of detail because there are much better sources than me for information on 3d printing.  A quick google search will get you plenty.  Everything I looked at was very helpful.  The most important thing that I picked up was you need to dial in your printer to your resin by adjusting exposure times.  I used TableFlip Foundry’s cones of calibration here

 https://www.tableflipfoundry.com/download/the-cones-of-calibration

This is version 3 of the test print and it has great supporting documentation, better than their version 2 that I used initially to do my tuning.  I had roughly a 75% fail rate initially.  Once I got the printer in tune with my resin my fail rate dropped to about 1% of the time and I honestly think that the recent failures are related to my film wearing out or poor support structures.

Getting set up and educated wasn’t difficult at all and I would suggest that anyone who is interested should give it a try.  It has been loads of fun. More details of my journey coming.