New Print, New Pics
I did a print a couple days ago.
I have posted new pics in a new gallery called “Peachy-Print 2”. Here’s the link

http://postimg.org/gallery/iqedknx0/

Quicker Setup
-Having the Salt premixed in the Drip bottle and a bit more in a second bottle helped make setup much quicker and cleaner. Not a single drop of water got on the table this time! Last time I had a small mess.

Drip system
-Use clips !! I got these white clips at the dollar store. 10 for $1.50. There bigger than I wanted but they are working out really well! MUCH easier to put on and take off than the plastic “O”s.
-I finally got the siphon down pat!! This system really does work fabulously !!
-I used DVD cases as my drip bottle stand. This allowed me to easily increase or decrease the height to get the drip rate I wanted. It worked really well !!

My One Mistake
-Zoom in on pic P1010462.
-I set the mesh to be, not over, not under, but just barley attracting the resin via surface tension. I thought this would be the perfect height. N0pe. The print did not adhere to the mesh and just floated up on the surface. It is VERY hard to see if this is happening until the print is done and your draining the salt water.
-Another oddity, my print is about 4 times smaller than it should have been?!? You can see a test on the glow paper in pic P1010454 showing the start of the print and the three base cylinders. They are almost as wide as the container (about 8cm between the 2 closer cylinders). This is the size it should have printed but you can see in P1010474 that is much smaller. I’m filing that one under “WTF” and will retest everything later (with manually added rafting).

Clean up and odor management
-Washing everything that touched resin with dish detergent, completely eliminated the smell of the resin. Also, I think the green resin has less odor than the red. I could hardly smell it while doing the print! I still had to do a 5 minute airing of my room.
-As an added precaution, I UVed EVERYTHING that touched resin, including the paper towels and my hands (having gloves is HIGHLY recommended). Even after violently scrubbing my hands with soap I still had a significant number of resin speckles all over my hands. Shining the UV light on my hands was like revealing some kind of “resin murder scene” !!! I couldn’t believe how much got on my hands! Curing the speckles with UV hardened them and they easily wiped off. However, I really don’t want to be breathing that in later. Use gloves.

Continuing problems
-The peachy software will NOT print the rafting I’m creating in Slic3r. I discovered by accident that it will print the “Skirt and Brim” (which are completely useless for the Peachy). I NEED RAFTING !!!! I do not want my print to be embedded in the mesh, even a little bit. Why would I want to destroy my print by ripping it out of the mesh !!
-I think the Peachy software is ignoring the rafting gcode. It does ignore the gcode for laser movement speed and for this it makes sense.
-I will do more experimentation with rafting settings and also manually adding thin rafting into my model directly. A thin extruded circle or triangle that touches several places on the bottom of the model will work perfectly and be easy to add. Also, if I make it about 10 layers deep, I can have the resin fully under the mesh and start my print and be confident that my model will adhere to the mesh but not be embedded in it.

The Future
As I stated in my previous posts, MY TIME IS LIMITED. As much as I want to build crazy cool stuff with the Peachy and share my experiences with all of you, it has to fit into my schedule.
“Good news everyone!”
Several personal and work schedule changes are happening right now for me. This should give me time to do prints and experiments at least once a week. I’m excited !!

More to come!