When the thing somebody wants already exists on Thingiverse and you've got an SLA printer this kind of thing becomes an easy favour to do and it has the added benefit of giving you an excuse to get more experience with the printer.
Levelling the bed and slicing with appropriate supports is definitely a learning exercise and I've had a few failed prints, which are annoyingly wasteful of resin.
In the end watching a few YouTube videos got me to this good process for levelling. There seems to be a lot of superstition about the levelling process with vocal adherents for different methods but I'm now getting good prints with this variant.
- Cut a piece of copier paper so it fits where the vat would go and so you can pull it back/forth from the front.
- Loosen the hex screw in the middle of the build plate so it can move around on the ball joint.
- CAREFULLY lower the build plate onto the paper (no vat) until it touches.
- Lower it slowly, 0.1mm at a time until the paper is firmly held and can't be pulled.
- Tighten the hex screw while putting light downward pressure on the build plate so it's firmly against the paper and screen.
- Raise the build plate 0.3mm.
- Lower the height of the build plate 0.1mm at a time until you can pull the paper out from underneath, but you can't push it back in. You may need to go back and forth a few times.
- Set this as zero through the menu.
- You do not need to do this every time, even if you've removed the build plate to extract a print.
Now I'm printing a few of the same thing in different sizes so my friend can try them with the figure, my first guess was perhaps a little oversize but the level of detail is fantastic. It's even better than it looks from the photo.
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