Operation Change The FEP

I’ve had an Anycubic Photon since January and love the little machine. It’s just awesome. It has some really good software, a crucially important file validator and produces some fantastic looking minis.

I use the printer maybe once or twice a week on average, but in recent weeks, I felt the quality of the prints just wasn’t quite what it should be.

Some of the minis came out looking just a tiny little bit over-exposed. I put this down to the change in weather (in winter, the resin was much colder and thicker) so simply reduced the exposure times by a half-second.

After doing this a few times (the temperature in my workshop, here in the UK, has gone from 13 degrees in Feb to about 28 in July) my exposure times were down from 10 sec/layer to 8. And while reducing the exposure times did help a little bit, it wasn’t long before I was being hyper critical about the print quality and changing things to try to improve them.

Then this week, the unthinkable happened.

I had my first failed print. Well, it was a partial fail. But a fail all the same.

One of the things I’ve been amazed at with my little printer is that I’ve only ever had one failed print (and that was back in February when I left it running overnight and forgot to leave the heater on in the workshop and the temperature fell to about 5 degrees!). Now, I *do* spend a lot of time preparing my .stls and sliced files for printing:

Workflow is:

• import .stl into Prusa slicer – not for slicing, but for supporting. Export the model with supports as a new .stl
• import this .stl into Chitubox (along with others) and slice the entire plateful of minis. Save as .photon file
• import this file into the Anycubic File Validator app; auto fix any islands – there are almost always 10-50 layers with islands even after doing this. Manually go through each layer with islands and either remove or connect them to existing structures.
• Print

It’s worked well to date. I’ve seen reports of people having five or six failed prints on the bounce. So I know the workflow is good.

So when not one, but three minis came of the plate with mangled limbs, I knew it was time to fix it!