Operation Change The FEP
Making it good again
I ran the screen test pattern from the utils menu, to make sure it wasn’t a problem with my LCD screen (I’m still running the original LCD and I reckon it must be getting close to the 200 hours limit where it starts to break down and need replacing).
Everything looked good. I checked the FEP film.
It didn’t actually look that bad. But I decided that something had to change to make things better, and the FEP seemed like the easiest place to start.
I was quite nervous about making any changes to my printer. It’s been working brilliantly from the day I took it out of the box, and I’ve read so many horror stories about people having nothing but trouble after they changed their FEP that I was tempted to just leave things alone and live with the slightly-over-exposed finish to my minis and gluing on extra limbs as necessary – after all, it was still printing minis (three out of eight on a plate being a bit dodgy is still better than some people manage with their printers!)
But – just like toothache – I knew that sooner or later, I’d have to get it seen to. So I jumped straight in. Actually, I didn’t. I spent about an hour looking at various blog posts, watching Youtube videos, hitting the forums etc. to try to mitigate any potential mishaps before they happened….
200 hours lifespan for the LCD screen? That seems like a very short time for a device that is on for several hours each time it is used.