Hey there! Just wanted to share something awesome that I came up with, and how I did it. If you follow my channel over on Vimm, you might have seen me design this ring on stream back in January:
I had a ton of fun designing it, and the prints look pretty fantastic! I'm wearing the green one in the picture right now! But one thing that kinda bugs me about this ring is that it screams for multiple colors. Just one color on it simply won't work long term. I mean, it's not a bad design, I just want a little bit more "pop" to my rings. I had heard of people pausing prints to make changes to resins before, and that led me down a rabbit hole. I wasn't sure if I could edit the files my Elegoo Mars uses, and it turns out I can't. Ideally, I would like to insert a pause command at a specific layer so I don't have to sit and watch the damn thing, but we can't always have nice things, now can we?
So instead of doing that, I had to manually pause the print. That meant I needed to know which layer to pause at. There's a great little app called Photon File Validator that was instrumental in finding the right layer to pause at. I set up the print, set a timer, and right before layer 333 could start curing, I paused the print!
With this extra time, I did a handful of things:
- I replaced the resin in the vat. I had to wash it out, make sure there was no residue, the whole nine yards.
- I washed the existing print to ensure there would be no cross contamination
- I made sure the print bed was still properly aligned after moving everything.
And what do you know?
One small bubble aside, that mistudomoe came out pretty fantastic! I had to clean up a little bit around the symbol before curing, as there was some spillage that didn't need to be included in the final product. But for an initial test, I would chalk that up as a success!
Going forward, I definitely need to let the resin in the vat sit for a little bit to let out any air bubbles. Actually, I got really smart and bought two more vats, which will make the overall change process much easier! I can leave the base color in one vat and have a second vat with the change color on standby, ready to go! Here's what I ordered off of Amazon, in case you're wondering. That is an affiliate link, your purchase does help me out at no cost to you.
This isn't the only multicolor resin experiment I've done lately. You'll have to drop by later, when I make another post for that one!