#resione

So, just to start off, again, this isn't a tutorial. This post is to document my own findings with this resin. It assumes you are not a complete beginner at printing. I love to share my info with people, but I can't teach you to print. There is a learning curve, like learning any new artistic medium. So. I'm usually pretty open to questions, but I'm not gonna look at your print and tell you how you failed, lol.

If you are new to printing, J3DTech's guide has been the most helpful to me. There is a lot to read and I didn't read it all at once; I still haven't done all of the stuff in the guide. That being said, I have been printing for 2-3 years and any stuff I did wrong ended up being covered in the guide, so I'm linking it here.

So, I have only used TH-BJD so far to print bust stands for ball-jointed dolls. The properties of the resin hold up to their claims. It's really great and I'm looking forward to using it more.

A few general observations:

-This resin is really thick. This causes a few issues:

--less resin drips off of the print and back into the vat, meaning that you will need more extra resin than you think. When working with any resin, I would do an extra 100mL of resin to cover the larger vat of my Saturn S. For this resin, I've been doing more than that; I don't measure, but it's somewhere between 150-200 extra.

--it causes bubbles, which can go over the edge of your vat. Do NOT fill it all the way to the "max" line; I leave at least a centimeter of space because the bubbles can cause it to flow over.

--the resin being dispersed away from the build plate and then flowing back into the vat pushes on your supports. If you have one single takeaway from this post, it is that you need to support your supports. Make them unmovable. You can physically see the resin shift the ends of your isolated supports around if you watch your printer.

-ResiOne has a short guide on their website and has support settings you can download. I use their support settings and also their cleaning recommendations (10 minutes each side lmaooo). I have really only used their "heavy" support settings because the things I have printed so far have been larger.

I also want to say, just in general, I do not prioritize speed while printing. I want the print to be quality. These bust stands, which use the entirety of my build plate, take 35 hours to print. I don't care. I want them to turn out well. I look at them once or twice a day to make sure nothing crazy happened, and I go about the rest of my day.

Here are the default settings they gave me over Instagram for my Elegoo Saturn S:

They do have different settings based on the size of your build plate, so if you have a smaller printer, you can probably do things faster. I don't have experience with this, but I think this is covered in the J3DTech guide. Larger printers need more time for the resin to fill back into the vat after being dispersed by the build plate, and that is more true with this resin, which is super thick.

So, a few things. I immediately thought the lift and retract speeds were too fast. I used these settings and they printed a small exposure test print just fine, but if you're printing larger parts oriented upright like I do with my doll limbs etc, it's probably going to cause some shift lines. And it did.

So I changed my settings. Notably, I changed them to the TSMC settings so there is dual speed. Basically this means that the printer moves slower as it peels the print off of the fep, and then faster when it is doing nothing other than lifting the build plate up with the print already on it. This helps prevent shift lines because, if it were moving fast that entire time, the print can become distorted, but having them at the slow speed that entire time would make prints take insanely long.

Here are my current settings. These are for their Cream White and Cream Pink colors. If you use Ultra White, the regular exposure is 1.8s and the bottom exposure is 40s.

One thing I do for every print is put a 40s rest time on my bottom layers. I don't know if I need to do this, but it's residual trauma from using SirayaTech Mecha. Anyway. On Elegoo printers you have to manually do this, so I punch it in and come back like 10 minutes later after the 8 bottom layers are done, and put it back to 3s.

Using these settings, I found that the prints themselves had fewer layer lines, but I noticed my supports were still being pushed around.

In the photos here, I drew arrows to show what I mean. These are supports that should be straight. In the first photo, one support actually detached from this shifting and sort of "fell down."

I noticed these only happened to long, isolated supports (you can see I wan doing a large print). Fortunately, nothing actually affected the print itself, but I went back into the file and added more supports, particularly the ones that attach one support to another rather than the single ones. I have indicated supports like these in this image:

The shapes I drew on the bottom in freaky support language are what I mean: the little cross-supports. These will help prevent your supports from shifting. As you can see in this print, it was fine, both because it was a smaller print but also from the cross-supports.

Here is another image of the improved support structure on my larger bust stand torso prints. These ones were using the same settings as the ones that shifted above, but are able to support themselves because I supported the supports more.