When I got back into SLA resin printing recently, I knew that I’d inevitably have to deal with the agony of failed prints and of course resin spills. This moment eventually came, and I felt motivated to treat mistakes as teaching moments on aspects like how to properly prepare an SLA build plate in terms of angles and supports or how to deal with failed print aftermaths.
Before moving on to the disaster, I’d like to first start with a look at the resin print of the previous article, which contained a number of fairly small parts. These I had oriented and supported almost fully using the automatic methods provided by the ChituBox slicer software, and worked about 90% as I had hoped, while leaving plenty of room for improvement as well.
Overall, preparing an SLA build plate in the slicer isn’t quite the same as for an FDM printer, mostly due to one phrase that strikes fear in the heart of anyone who has ever done resin printing: “peeling forces”.
Not Bad, Not Great
For last article’s resin print, I had to put a number of models onto the build plate in the slicer, after which I mashed ‘auto arrange’, ‘auto orient’ and then ‘auto support’ in their respective tabs. I did change the orientation of the beam so that it wasn’t pointing straight upward any more, as I wasn’t going to wait a few extra hours for it to print just for that single object.
