Thinking of buying Wanhao D7

1. What is your rate of failed prints to successful?
Consider you have to tune the printer for exposure time with each resin your fails will usually be two to three per bottle. Then factor in the printability and orientation of the print and you could see more fails.

2. Would you buy this printer again?
Yes I would. They are not bad machines if you don't get a lemon from the get go.

3. Resin recommendations / warnings?
Don't use their resin. Use another brand. I use 3dInk.

4. Does it smell as bad as they say? Ventilation requirements? I print in a spare bedroom of my apartment.
Only their resin has a bad odor. The rest I have tried are barely noticeable.

5. I plan on building a curing unit and getting some extra resin. Anything else I might need to get started?
Tubes to wash your model in with alcohol and lots of alcohol. The prints come out with liquid resin on them and only alcohol and a few other chemicals dissolve it.

6. Any other advice you might offer aside from what I'm asking is welcome.
Get a Pi and run nanoDLP once you get the hang of using it.

It's here!

I'm still at the office so I can't start playing yet.

Any suggestions on a locally sourced homebrew curing box? I've ordered some stuff from Amazon to build one but it will take a little while before it gets here and my apartment gets about an hour of sun in the morning if I'm lucky and then it's shade all day long.

A little late but My first makeshift curing box used this. I think you can find this lamp for cheaper elsewhere.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/QUANS-110V-20W … SwrT9aumTs

I just used a box with an appropriate hole in the top to let the lamp sit on top and shine into the box.

Thanks for all the responses everyone. It's been a bit of a tough time for the family lately so I haven't had much time to work on this. Here's where I've gotten to.

I use Octopi to control my FDM printers so I figured I'd go straight for a nanodlp setup. I did a bunch of reading on the facebook groups and finally came to the conclusion that I should follow the instructions at https://3dprinterwiki.info/d7/easy-nano … ll-option/ including updating the firmware.

I let nanodlp update itself. I created a resin profile based on the settings from a Creation Workshop profile for the Wanhao red that came with my printer. I created a plate and let it complete processing in nanodlp. I did a dry run with the bed detached and the vat empty. It homed and then appeared to be projecting purple images onto the screen and all working correctly.

So last night, I levelled the plate, added some resin to the vat, hit print and put the cover on. An hour and a half later I had a dripping plate with nothing attached and apparently no cured resin at all in the vat. I'm stumped at this point. I tried re-imaging the pi and doing the same tests without updating nanodlp without any further luck.

I was going to try running from CW as a fallback. I have two older laptops running linux and CW under wine. Just my luck, the one with vga only output makes its com port available to CW under wine and controls the machine fine but can't send any images due to no hdmi. I have another laptop that can see the hdmi display but I can't get CW to see the comport for the D7. So at this point I'm stuck and will have to do some more reading / youtubing and figure it out I guess. Also trying to see if I can get at that comport by running CW under a windows instance running in virtualbox.

On the bright side, I did a little maintenance on my beat up old solidoodle this weekend and it is putting out some of the best prints of its life. Once again, a huge thank you to lawsy who commented in this thread and designed most of the mods that make that crappy old solidoodle sing. Also, I already watched your vids when doing my research. Thanks for sharing!

PS I found a 40W nail curing box on craigslist for $20 and will make a curing box from that.

1st 4 layers at 80 seconds, then 16 second layers.

I tried playing with the calibration plate generator and again could not get any curing at all.

I think I'm going to have to drain the tank and do some more dry runs. Hopefully will have some time after work today.

I'm working under the assumption that if I could see purple images in the expected shapes on my previous dry run that means my uv and lcd are functioning and it must just be a software or configuration thing.