2mm Strength & Honour

I got a Voxelab Proxima 6.0 for my birthday in January from my brother-in-law (Thanks Nick 🙂 ).  It has sat unboxed until a couple of weeks ago when we decided to try to get it up and running.

After cleaning and checking the components and very straightforward assembly we were ready to go.  I was given Voxelab basic grey resin to start.  Knowing I wanted to print some 2mm miniatures for this game I purchased a set of Roman Legion stls from Project Wargaming. $4 for the files to print an entire Roman Legion – great value.

After a bit of experimentation and some failed prints this is the setup:

1 – Voxelab resin printer.  The observant will notice it has a Creality screen showing.  More on that later…

2 – Paper products.  A half sheet of A4 for leveling and a roll of paper towel for cleaning and mop up.

3 – Alcohol.  The takeaway tub is the cleaning bath, half full of isopropyl alcohol (99%) the parts are prised off the print bed and dropped straight in.  A minute or two soaking and gentle swirl and they come out clean.  Behind is the half litre bottle I use for pouring over the print block to clean it and the big bottle is one of the five that Amazon supplied.

4 – My work area.  An old metal tray from a GW paining station is used as the surface that the prints are removed and cleaned on.  A metal spatula is essential to get the prints off the bed.  Latex gloves also essential and not in the photo is my breathing mask – the fumes are unpleasant and dangerous.

5 – UV light curing box.  Part of my birthday present was this box.  Came flat packed but simple assembly.  It has a simple turntable and UV LED light array inside with a timer switch on the power lead.  These are small prints so 75 seconds in here seems to be enough to cure them.

5 – Resin.  This is a basic grey.  The collapsible funnel is to assist with decanting resin back from the printer bath back into the bottle.  I use paper filters specifically designed for resin (available on Amazon).  You can use domestic coffee filters but they get clogged easily apparently.

Issues before it worked:

1st, 2nd and 3rd failed prints – print bed not level or far enough down – not enough bed adhesion so prints ended up stuck to the FEP film on the bottom of the bath.  Also spilt about a third of a bottle of resin when the funnel collapsed because it was too full.  Learned to hold it and pour SLOWLY!

4th failed print – printer stopped accepting the Chitubox slicer files.  I was using the Voxelabs standard firmware and Chitubox 9.0+ isn’t compatible apparently with this older style printer.  The fix was on Reddit.  This printer has a Creality motherboard and is therefore effectively a Creality LD-002H.  Ran the firmware upgrade supplied on Reddit and hey-presto I’ve now got a Creality printer 🙂  The print is now sticking to the print bed as I’m using platforms and upped the base layers to 8 from 6 and the exposure time to 50 seconds.  Still some missing sections – print bed too crowded.  Deleted about a third of the intended prints, you can’t totally fill the bed as I had and must leave a gap between each model and offset them on either side of the bed.  Just over half of the bed surface covered is about right.

5th failed print – poor fine detail.  upped the exposure time to 4.2 seconds for all layers and upped from light to medium supports which were already set to 74% density following guidance from the designer.

6th print – fine.  Very minor detail missing but good enough for me.