Presupported Mess

 I don't think I mentioned it here, but I got into resin printing a while back and love it. It is so long between updates here that I'm on my second resin printer. I started with a used Photon S and moved on to a new Mars 3 pro. I love it. The Mars is 8x faster than the Photon. I am not sure my eyes are good enough to notice a change in quality to a mono screen though. 

Resin printed increased my need for file storage by 10 fold. GW takes down files in waves. There was already a great Thingiverse purge and now 40k files are very hard to find there. They seem to be picking at Cults now with obvious IP infringements being taken down. I've moved on from scraping Cults to telegram channels. There is so much free stuff there and it is blowing up my hard drives. I went from a 1 Tb hard drive to a 2 and now I have every flash drive I can find loaded up. 

I lost my files a while back. I had a flash drive in a USB hub and was backing it up. The backup shorted out and then the main one did too. In a second I lost months of downloading and organizing. I paid a company to restore it and it was like $1000. They did not even recover all the files. It was not worth it in the end but it taught me a lesson about backing stuff up. I spent a few days learning 7zip and burning all my 40k and fantasy stuff onto CDs. 

I've bought a few files here and there but most of them are free. Thing is it takes so much time to sort them. Yes I could download on demand what I wanted but with files getting taken down, I save anything that I ever might want to print. Which is a lot. 

I ended up buying MARTINLETIEC's NEKHRON IMMORTALS because they looked pretty good and came pre-supported. I threw some in ole Lychee and like half of the prints failed. Lots of the failures were in the middle of the plate so I thought it was a loose FEP. I tightened all the bolts and tried again. Still about half of them failed. I added some lighting effects to a pre-supported tesla gun and had to support the lightning. Time after time, the lightning prints fine but the gun fails. 

That's pretty damning so I added three copies of the same model to the slicer. One was pre supported, one I just hit auto supports and the other I supported by hand. In every case, the pre-supported model failed. The auto-support model failed half the time and my supports worked all the time. 

Pre-supported models are nice and they save time, but if it is worse than auto-supports then it ends up costing more time. This is why I typically like to do my own supports. I know my printer, my resin, my setting, my temp. I know what works and what does not. I see failures on tiny things and iterate until I can get the smallest details to print and the supports not to leave damage.