New SLA Printer MonoPrice

pretty much all Monoprice printers are rebadged - most being of the Malyan family
and they are currently out of stock.

Thanks

Anyway, For the last coup[le of days I've been fooling around with this thing at work, and I've had a few setbacks.

First of all, I updated the firmware, and as luck would have it, it created problems.  After the update, every print failed in one way or another.  Not only that, but noticed that the prints were taking a very long time, so I started watching it print, and noticed that every layer was taking about 40seconds to print.

for those that are not familiar with DLP/MSLA printer, the first few layers (base layers) have longer exposures (30-40 seconds depending on printer and resin), and subsequent layers have a lot shorted exposures 6-10 seconds.

In this printer's case, the base layers were set to 40 seconds, and the rest were supposed to be 7 seconds.  After the firmware update, all layers were taking 40 seconds.  In fact a print that should have lasted about 5 hours, was still printing the next day some 18 hours later.

Anyway, I re-flashed the firmware, and now it's working OK.  But I ran out the meager sample resin, and bought some Apply Lab Works Modelling Grey for MSLA. 

This time the issue is completely different.  Even though the exposure rates for this resin are very similar to the resin from Monoprice, it creates such heavy suction to the FEP, that the print fails.  It's virtually impossible to lift the build platform and separate the print from the FEP, even by hand.

I managed to get one print done, a small one, using supports without the raft, so the contact points were pretty small, but I've got to figure out how to make this work correctly.

So here are a a few photos of the print I was running. The first one is the print fresh off the print bed, still wet and on it’s supports.

If you look close, you can see a separation line about 1/4 or 1/3 of the way up, when I pause the print to make sure ti was actually attached to the print bed. That pause and lift left a scar on the print.

The photos below show the model after I removed the supports and cleaned it up a little. The quality and detail are very good for 0.05mm print, and I can go down to 0.025, but this isn’t bad at all. If you look close you can still see a few layer marks here and there, which are due to the coupler between the Z motor and and the threaded rod. I’ll probably replace the couple they have with a flex coupler I have somewhere around here.

Anyway, here is the output of my MP Mini SLA and Apply Lab Works Grey resin, after only about 4 hours of tweaking during my lunch hour.

Here is another print I did this past week.

It's another Warhammer 40K miniature. This time, Saint Celestine of the Adeptas Sororitas. This is a more complex print I tried because I'm trying to find the limits of this printer.  This is made up of 4 parts, and they take up most of the print surface.

Originally I was a bit worried about the lack of supports generated around the wings, and the sword blade, but as you can see they printed fine. The only issue is at the bottom of the left wing, the tips of the feathers either broke off, or never printed, although they did have supports. I'm sure I can fix that with some green stuff putty, or simply reprint the wings.

First image is a multi-view of the model still on supports, fresh of the press, and how it looked in Slic3r:

And this is the model after I cleaned most of the supports and assembled it.  As previously mentioned, there are a few issues, the bottom tips of the left wing didn't print, also on the sword ribbon there's supposed to be a rose, and instead there's just a blob.

I may reprint the wing, or just fix it.  Don't know yet.  All in all, not too bad, I think this little thing is a keeper.