Unruly

I'll just leave this here. WIP. Privateer Press Mini-crate from a couple months ago finally showed up. Death Metal Fel Caller, that I just absolutely had to have because just look at it(though he's more waaaay more punk rock than death metal with those liberty spikes). Except the guitar hasn't been touched yet aside from painting the hand the color of the rest of the skin. Not gonna lie, I kind of like how the thing looks with just the stuff I have painted already and the priming.

Last month I was posting in the 3d printing stuff, but I haven't been able to print anything lately so haven't been posting. I'm not getting rid of the red, at least not yet. I'm painting that section with chalkboard paint. It's very tedious, because you've got to let it sit for 2 hours, minimum, between coats and it needs at least 2 coats to work properly. I've got 4 coats so far, because despite sanding the wall down to being smooth the primer and first two coats picked up too much texture from the roller, so I had to hit it with sandpaper to wear it back down, then do it again before the 4th coat. It's still not as smooth as I'd like it to be, but since I don't have a power sander and am doing it by hand it's just going to have to do. Now I'm supposed to wait at least 22 more hours before trying to actually write on it...

I'm painting again. Walls count, right? It is for the game room, after all.

My first bottle was paid. Elegoo doesn't give free resin with the printer, sadly. I've thought about different colors and brands, but the Elegoo ABS-like gray seems to be among the best when it comes to price and quality from what I've seen elsewhere. Some of what I've seen is people taking the ABS gray and mixing it with the Elegoo ABS translucent blue 50/50, or mixing it with Siraya Blu, to get better results, but I haven't tried it yet. In fact, I haven't printed anything since my last post. Life got in the way. But once I kill off this first bottle of gray I'm gonna try mixing a 50-50 gray/translucent blue in the bottle.

So these have to be support failures. They have to be. I've gotten failures like this across 3 different pieces, from two different models. This one isn't as bad as the other two, but it still bugs me because I could have sworn I got everything and had enough supports stuck up his crotch to make sure it would print right. The way this is going, I'm going to kill my first bottle of resin and half the prints are going to be failures. I know, I'm new to the game and it's a learning process, but I can still get frustrated.

So I've had another set of support failures. I've been making it a habit to have a multitude of files ready to print and switch to printing a different thing when one fails, rather than going and fixing the first thing's issues and immediately reprinting it. This time around it was a giant demon mini. The torso/arms did a similar double failure to what I had with the beholder, but not nearly as badly. And this one wasn't hollowed out so I can't blame it on that. I just must have missed some islands or under-supported. I'm betting on under-supporting, because lately I've been trying to use fewer supports than I was. When the torso failed, I switched to the right wing. This printed up nicely, except it actually broke while it was printing. When it finished and I went to take it off the build plate the part that connects to the body had broken off of the main wing. Not a big deal, though. Some super glue, a pin or two, and a tiny sliver of green stuff will fix that up. But it still makes me think I need to go in and add another couple supports there and see if that helps prevent future breaks. It also got a couple weird lines in it. Could be that those were mishaps caused by my pausing the print, though. I may have accidentally made it skip a layer or two, I don't know. It just looks like something shifted slightly mid-print. And speaking of shifted... I went on to printing the left wing after that, and it printed fine. Or rather it would have printed fine, had I remembered to tighten the build plate down after I removed the right wing. So I got a "complete" wing but it looks like it was carved out of a striated cliff. No offense to the people with FDM printers, I know they've gotten better than they were a few years ago, but I got a resin printer because I didn't want to see layer lines like that. These supports are supposed to be straight...

I present to you my latest failure. Meet Xantaras, tyrant eye, most beautiful of his kind, and emperor of all things! This little guy here was my first attempt at hollowing out a model for printing. I made sure he had drain holes(8 in total, all hidden in places where other parts would have attached), I put supports inside him because when I viewed the inside I found islands, and I thought I had him good and done. I thought wrong, I guess. He's my most interesting failure to date because he's failed twice in a single printing. Something obviously went horribly wrong at the start, because his lower jaw just failed to print outside of a couple horns. And then when it got to starting to print his upper jaw it somehow managed to pull the failed part of the lower jaw off of the FEP using the single part of the lower jaw that printed correctly, and it printed the bulk of his upper half before the supports failed entirely and he detached from them. I'm honestly really surprised at that. I figured once a print started to fail by getting stuck to the FEP it was done and over for everything that used that same part of the screen because no more light would come through there. I never would have expected it to manage to pull the failed part back up and resume printing properly halfway through. I'm currently working on the assumption that I did something wrong with the hollowed model, and am attempting a print of a solid version. If the solid version fails, then I know it's back to the drawing board entirely.

Do you remember if the water was super hot the other times it happened? Have you reprinted anything that this happened to using the same print settings, and if so did it happen the second time? It may be worth trying a second printing, having the near-boiling water on standby, and checking for the lines after the alcohol wash but before putting it in water. If the lines are there, it's a print issue. If they aren't then give it the dip in the water and see if that causes them. If it's a print issue I don't know how it'd be fixed or what exactly would cause it, but at least you'd have narrowed it down and can maybe find someone more knowledgeable to help. But I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it was the water.

Well, I wasn't entirely happy with the way that the multipart version of Cayde came out, so I took a look at the full figure model. The base was attached, which worried me, but it all fit on the build plate pretty much perfectly so my fears were unfounded. It took about 11 hours to print, and it came out great. I think I went a little overboard on the supports, though. The gap between his cape and his back looked like it would be a problem, since I had him laying horizontal to fit, so I put a bunch of supports in there running from the cape to his back. But after it was printed I was looking at them and I think I could have gotten away with half as many supports as I placed. Most of what I placed were to give a little more strength during printing rather than being actually necessary to prevent bits from printing while unattached to anything else, and I just don't know that they were needed. And I definitely could have done most of them as freestanding supports coming in from the side rather than coming up from his cape to his back. But that was me just being lazy and trying to knock out the supports quickly. And while I printed the multipart one at a lower quality level, so it's a little fuzzier on the detail, I think the single piece one is much, much better just by virtue of the gaps being gone and not relying on my horrible gap filling abilities. Also, the cape is actually scaled right. I just need to do a lot more cleanup on the cape for the single piece because I had to put a lot of supports on the back of it for proper printing.

Well, it's currently got two absolutely ancient(more than 20 years old) Maxtor 40gb IDE drives in it because they were my test beds when I first tried messing with it back in 2010. They still spun up when I powered it up just now, but they were audibly rough. They won't be staying in there. Most likely I'll toss a couple 10 year old HDDs into RAID 1 and see how long they last. Hard drives aren't really my worry for this, though. Drives are easily sourced, and this is solely for local storage with immediate access. Anything I really want to make sure I keep goes onto my Google Drive as well as a couple other locals that are less immediate. Because nothing, not even a brand new drive, is 100%. My main worry is that the capacitors on the motherboard have started to go bad. This is a board from 2005. If it goes, there's likely no replacing it. And I don't really have the money to build anything new unless I go the Raspberry Pi route. And that would be a whole new learning curve. Though, honestly, a Pi would probably spank this thing since it's quad core at just 300mhz slower per core, and it would draw a fraction of the power. Wouldn't have good RAID support, but it also wouldn't cost me a couple hundred bucks like a proper NAS would.

As I'm just getting started in this, I'm planning on just using an old 2tb drive from an out of service PC as external storage. Either that or finally trying to set up my ancient home server that I built a decade ago using old parts and never really did anything with. I mean, it's an AMD Opteron 165 on a Tyan Tomcat, so it's actual server hardware, it's just old as heck now. Should be plenty for a Linux based fileserver, though. If it still works.

The 21 hour print went well, despite me technically screwing it up. I forgot about the whole "thinner slices means slightly less exposure time" thing and so I was exposing the 0.02mm slices for the same time as the default 0.05mm slices. But we're learning as we go. Also got the cape for Cayde-6 to finally print out. But it's off scale slightly or else the person that made the model didn't cut the pieces correctly for multipart printing. It looks fine from the front though, so it's not that big of a deal. But between that and the gaps at the waist and shoulders it makes me wonder just how big of a pain it would be to print the single piece version. Hopefully the single piece version still has the base detached, because the base has to be angled sharply in order to fit and still takes up almost the entire build plate. Looks kinda like Star Lord and Groot.

Well, my Cayde has arms now. Still no cape, though. And because I wanted to try it just to see how it does, I just started a big old treant, the full size version of the 3 I printed before, with a .02mm layer size. It's going to take over 20 hours to print. Oh, and because I was dumb and did the previous printings' supports on a scaled down version rather than doing them on the full size and then scaling it all down, I had to do all new supports. Wish me luck!

And the piece that I thought was peeling and was most likely to fail this time did exactly what I thought it would do. It peeled off the plate and failed. The other two pieces, however, are doing just fine. So now I'll have to print up the cape by itself. I might try reorienting it and redoing the supports for the next printing, to try and cut down on the suction. Or I'll just redo the supports so that there's a much larger base to it.

I did an autorepair on my supported project file, sliced it, and just spent the last 20 minutes starting and physically checking a print of those pieces every few layers. I put on a glove and physically touched the build plate to find the edges of the pieces at layers 3, 6, and 15 since that's generally too small to see when you pause the print and the plate is covered in wet resin. They were there on the plate, though at the last check it felt like one corner of the cape was starting to possibly peel. But a visual inspection at around layers 30 and 50 showed that it was still there and the supports were building out from it, so I have hope that it will stick. At the very least it's made it farther than any other attempt has so far. The other two pieces seem to be doing just fine as well. So now I'm just going to let it print for a while and check back in like 45 minutes. If it's survived to then, I'm confident that it will survive the last hour-ish.