Decided to get a resin setup.

[curious aardvark]

well it's sitting on the table behind me.
All clean and shiny and levelled and ready to go.
The test grid comes up fine.

Hopefully, I'll be getting it sticky and messy after walking the dogs.

So a couple of first impressions.
Quality build, tank like, comes to mind.
Even the plastic hood is solid and just feels 'nice'.

Well packed and comes with tools - one thing that says quality above all else are the allen keys it comes with.
Real quality hardened tool steel with the ball end on the long axis. None of that cheap metal that round off as soon as you look at it.
Even the usb stick is metal !

So it's a top notch piece of engineering.

But, somehow they've managed to fit the noisiest stepper motor I have EVER heard.
My monoprice mini delta is famous for being noisy, with all 4 motors running.
This is louder with just the one motor !
And its a mechanical drone, that cuts through all ambient noise.

Now I don't do upgrades to my machines, it's almost never necessary.
But if there's a way to add a silent stepper motor driver to this - I will do it asap !
lol
The cooling fans seem to have been sourced from the same totally deaf supplier.

Other than noise, the proxima has so far exceeded all my expectations.
Even the setup manual was good.

Oh yeah, keeping dog hairs out of the resin vat - that's going to be a real ongoing battle lol.

[curious aardvark]

Well it's printing - I think :-)You can't actually see if anything's actually printing for at least an hour, when the buildplate raises above the level of the resin vat.So I've basically set up the first print with one thing laying flat and one standing on end.The flat one is a test on how easy it is to remove a large surface layer.And the other is how well a small area adheres.I've also put some really small text on them.I did speed up the layer settings, so also a test on whether I should have left well enough alone ;-)

[curious aardvark]

3d printing seems to always come back to the same issue.

Getting the first layer down clean and tight.

I mastered this on fdm printers nearly a decade ago.

Resin - hmm, not so much.

No matter how few base layers I use or how fast i cure the base layer. It always filles in any gaps.
After the first layer everything is beyond incredible.
Precise and with microscopic detail.

But getting any kind of detail down on the first layer.

Now I'm using water washable clear resin.
So I'm wondering if the uv light is passing through the water in the resin, reflecting off the build plate and curing all the resin that's not supposed to be cured.

After the base layers, it's all perfect.
I'm down to 2 seconds a layer for general printing.
And 2 layers of 8 seconds for the initial attachment base layer.

I'm beginning to see why all the prints you see are nowhere near the build plate and swaddled in a massive waste of supports.

Even items with a solid base, generate a brim that is not switched on or shown in the slicer.

I don't believe it's necessary to waste all the resin in supports that people seem to. Plus the few supports I've tried have been bastards to remove and on a delicate model, just break it.

The other issue is flashdlprint, Does not give you any control over the number of base layers, the peel and lift speeds.

So I'm currently using the early version of chitubox that came with the printer.
Gives you access to all the settings flashdlprint does not.
The peel and left speeds are way too high, but can't find the default that flashdlprint uses.

So I'm wondering if I need an opaque resin, an isopropyl alcohol based resin or just need to keep fiddling with the settings.

Once i get the first layer issue sorted, the possibilities of this printer are pretty awesome.

At the end of the day.
There are only three actual parameters you can change on this printer:
1) exposure time
2) peel speed
3) lift speed.

Actually you can also adjust the lifting distance for the peel and lift heights.

Hmm.
Gives me a couple of mad ideas :-)
Does it actually NEED the lift after the peel ?
As long as there's a small gap for the next later of resin to flow into. What purpose does the lift serve ?

And yes i know someone out there is probably shouting at the screen: 'you can't do it like that'.
And there's proably a really good reason you can't.

But you don't ACTUALLY know unless you try. And very few people will actually try to do things that they are told can't be done.

I've spent the last 8 or 9 years doing things with fdm printers I've been told couldn't be done.

So I doubt I'll stop now lol