Alkmaar, Nederland. October 2021. What a s**t month.
I continued with the printing of the Wurtemburg infantry figures from Piano Wargames that I'd started last month with a little bit of success. On 5th October, I printed the Jaegers and Jaeger command, 12 figures in total. Of these, one had a thin and wobbly scabbard and another had the butt of his musket missing. So, a good result all told. Flushed with that success and the idea that my FEP was fine, I took another go at printing some of the previously failed figures and some of the Light infantry figures. Another 12 figures on the plate. This time only 6 were printed without issue. Two fell off their supports and 4 had various bits missing or badly printed.
A collection of successful prints from several sessions.
A collection of failures, bits of arms missing etc.
Maybe it was something wrong with the supports. In any event the next day I retried the Ganesha bust that had failed so badly the previous month. This time I'd added supports to the areas I suspected had been too weak last time. I have no photo of this as after 3 hours of printing I discovered it had fallen off the supports and was now an undefined mass in the vat. Marvellous.
A few days later I was willing to once more try my luck with more of the Wurtemburgers. This time the skirmish figures and some casualties. Another 12 figures were loaded onto the plate, all pre-supported. Only 5 of them printed without issue. One didn't even print the supports, Five had bits missing and one had part of it falling off the supports. Once more the vat needed cleaning. A couple of days later I retried the ones that had failed having added some extra supports. An even bigger disaster as of the 9 figures on the plate, only 1 printed without issue. One fell off the plate and the others had bits missing.
Successful skirmishers and a casualty.
Successful retries.
Oh dear, fine if they were in a trench.
Mangled or missing arms.
Fed up with the lack of success with the Wurtemburgers, I next tried to reprint the City Watch captain figure from Lion's Tower. I also added the Dynasty Ballista and crew from Clay Cyanide's May 2021 release. Unfortunately, the Vimes figure fell off the supports and the frame of the ballista was only partially printed. Everything else went well, though.
The Ballista crew and most of the ballista
I continued to investigate possible causes for the number of failures I'd been getting, especially since changing the FEP. One possible cause may be the speed of the build plate being lifted out of the vat. Apparently, there seems to be a dead zone of speeds which is around the 90-150 mm/min mark. Recommended speeds are below 90 or above 150. I set the lift speed within Lychee at 60mm/min and retried some of the previous Wurtemberg failures. Once again, 12 figures on the build plate of which only 5 printed without issues. Most of the failures were missing parts of their arms for some reason.
More disfigured Wurtemburgers
I then spent some time creating my own sculpture by following a tutorial. Of course, the guy in the video made it all look so easy. His Chimpanzee skull actually looks like it's a Chimpanzee skull. Unfortunately, mine looked more like the result of an Orc breeding with a Chimp. However, it printed without major issues, which was something of a relief given the recent state of the printing attempts.
Big teeth.
With the success of printing the skull, I immediately filled the vat with more resin and retried printing the Ganesha bust from Clay Cyanide for the 3rd time. Hopefully, the slower lifting speed and the reinforced supports I'd added would be enough to get a successful print. Six and a half hours later and I was over the moon to find that it had printed almost perfectly. A little bit of flattening on one of the tusks and a hole in part of the body were trivial compared to what had gone before and something that was easily sorted with some Green Stuff.
Ganesha bust from Clay Cyanide
Once more, the success of a print went to my head and I finished the month printing the Werewolf bust from White Wolf Tavern and the Griphon figure from RN Estudio. Well, that was the plan. Both the bust and the base fell off their supports to create a mound in the vat as usual. As for Griphon, from the front it looked perfect, however, from the back there was a rather large delamination mark.
Looking good, where's the cloak though?
Okay, something not quite right here.
So, October truly was a bad month for successful prints with more than half failing. The worst offenders were the Wurtemberg infantry, some of which I never managed to print completely. There are so many factors involved in getting a successful print. I made sure the build plate was level, the FEP was new, the resin had been well shaken, and the lift speed was slow enough not to cause too much suction force to pull the model off the plate. What may have been an issue is the temperature. Since my setup is in the garage, it may now be too cold for printing. I notice that I never had this amount of failures earlier in the year when it wasn't so cold. I'll need to get some heat near my printer to continue and eliminate that from possible causes.
October saw me having 10 printing sessions over 8 different days. A total of 70 items were attempted but only 34 were successful. The printer was busy for 33 hours and 31 minutes with the longest print being 6 hours and 24 minutes for the slower print of the Ganesha bust.
The Price of Crowns (Wurtemberg Infantry) - Piano Wargames