So it’s been a week now that I’ve owned my Elegoo Mars and right out of the box the printer is incredible. I’ve already made a bit of money printing things for people and it’s about halfway paid for itself. BUT… in my opinion the printer you pull out of the box has a couple of issues that can be easily taken care of with two upgrades.
Why upgrade a brand new printer if there’s nothing really wrong with it?
Glad you asked…
After a day or two of printing I noticed that the supports or anything set to print on the build plate didn’t exactly stick right. This led to some failed prints that led to me messing up the super sensitive FEP film which led to even more failed prints.
Thanks to Amazon and free Prime shipping I was able to find two things to correct all my issues.
- Upgraded Build Plate – there’s a different version of the build plate available that features a milled bare metal surface that provides much better adhesion than the standard anodized one that ships with the printer.
- Extra Resin Tanks – Since I wanted these anyhow and wasn’t quite ready to replace the FEP film unless I had some spares I went ahead and purchased two new resin tanks/vats. These are plastic and are sold as a pair.
Here are the links on Amazon to these upgrades before I get too far ahead of things and forget to add them. I’ve also added a link for the printer itself and the resin I chose to start with based on its price of $17.00 a bottle.
One thing I noticed after watching several YouTube videos was that I am not the only one that had these issues in the beginning, one of the fixes for the build plate was to scuff it up with some sandpaper. This worked for a few prints but still wasn’t the greatest… I did however notice that when I went to scuff up my build plate, the surface is actually not flat. I’m not sure if I got a bad build plate or not but mine is definitely not flat. So instead of tinkering with it to try and make it flat I just ordered a couple of the build plates listed above. At $22.00 each it’s really a cheap upgrade and I have not had a printer related failure since I switched over to this.
The plastic vats was a no brainer for me. I wanted to be able to print things in different colors and easily swap out resin between prints so having a couple of extra tanks/vats is perfect. These come with lids and the FEP film preinstalled. They were a bit pricey in my opinion but being able to take them out of the box, peel off the protective layer on the underside, and put them to use right away was great.
The one thing I find somewhat annoying is that the build plate upgrade is actually made by Elegoo and in my opinion should have shipped with the printer from the get go. It is what it is though and I’m happy to be printing with less problems now. So definitely consider these two upgrades, possibly even order them at the same time as your printer to save some headache. Elegoo even touts the milled build plate as being better, so why not just ship it with the printer?
You’re still here ??? GET TO PRINTING SOMETHING !!!
You must be logged in to post a comment.