Any prints from the Beta team?

[jstrack2]

20141203_012442_LLS.jpg20141203_011747.jpg

Here is a small owl I printed. I had some trouble getting a good photo of it since it is clear, so in real life it looks better. For example you can clearly see the feet on the log in real life, but it isn't so easy by these pictures. Also to save on resin the owl is only 4cm tall and 2cm wide at its widest point, so the details are pretty small.

[User_Defined]

Nice print Jstrack2!

You seem to be the only one printing anything these days! Has there been a slowdown of beta development?

I have some questions:

Are you intentionally making those layers thick to avoid surface tension problems and holes?

Is this a first-shot print (or are there failed owls before this)?

it appears the only thing in the way of amazing prints is the layer height. I can't wait to see more progress!

[jstrack2]

There has been a slowdown in terms of number of beta testers actively working. However there is a lot of progress being made.

This was my first attempt and I just made big changes with my printer so I I could certainly do better with the current setup.

As for the layers they actually aren't thick at all, it just looks that way in the picture. In fact they are only 0.01 mm thick! For some reason though my laser is shaking every few layers, and this is making the end result look rough. I am not sure why this is, but hopefully I will be able to figure out what is causing that real soon. If you look the top of the head you can kind of see how it is smooth. It is actually even much smoother than that. The layers are too small to see in the sense that curves seem totally continuous (in real life, not the picture).

For this print I have a stepper motor dropping a plunger thing to raise the lower the resin between each layer. Therefore the cured resin gets fresh resin with each layer. A problem that I noticed though is that there can be more than 0.01 mm of new resin added (because resin has non zero viscosity) so over many layers parts can start rising out of the resin a bit. I think if I print at say 0.03 mm per layer this problem will go away. Also high frequency vibrations could help. Or of course lower viscosity resin. Plus if the laser is weak so it is only partially curing then you could get smoothness that is far less than 0.01 mm. In fact I don't know if there is any real limit to how smooth it could get (or at least down to the molecular level).