May 13 2020
Several months ago, I started this series of articles on getting the Prusa SL1 to work for the production of Kalidasia Miniatures and I ran into a number of issues. As a quick recap, I was getting things like this:
After getting a basic understanding of supports, I started getting successful prints, but the results were often inconsistent. For example, when printing three identical miniatures, two would succeed and one would fail.
Don’t pay attention to those miniatures being Tiger Sharks…That’s not the point of this article. I initially assumed that this was caused by something I was doing wrong. In general, with mechanical devices, strange random issues are usually the result of the operator. However, in this case, I discovered over time that the failures were not actually random.
After calibration, the first print would work great. Then, with each successive print, more and more of the miniatures on the build plate would fail in a predictable pattern. With some help from the crew of the SL1 Facebook group, the issue turned out to be caused by a slightly incorrect assembly of the printer. As a note, I purchased the fully assembled version of the printer.
One or more of the dozen or so bolts that held the printer together were not completely tightened down. This would cause some aspect of the printer to become slightly misaligned during the printing process and this misalignment would get a little bit worse with each print. Tightening down these bolts solved the issue and I have not needed to recalibrate the build plate since February or so.
For more information, check out my Tabletop Battlefield video on this issue:
The good news is that with the printer running, some miniatures should be appearing soon. I will leave you here with this picture:
