Thursday, January 01, 2026
The Great Pyramid Of Phail
Happy New Year!
The hand has healed up enough to make more slides, so I printed all the ideas I had kicking around while convalescing. I tried a few 200μm diameter micromugs, which ended up being dog bowls again, and a chain of hinged squares to test multiple folding. I'll cover that in a later post when I've origami'd it.
But the main push was to try and print a pyramid, on the grounds that they're infamous for standing up. Mine was 400μm on each of its three sides, and 300μm tall, making it the tallest and largest thing I've tried to print.
Of course, it didn't go as expected. It looks like it's spent 10,000 years in a rough desert and learned bad things from a ziggurat:
It didn't help that I probably started the probe a bit too low either. My guess is I need to get the layer size (2.5μm) down even further to make sure there's enough resin in the middle of it, maybe adjust the print width a little lower too. However, it did print all the way up even if it did sag like a poorly-baked cake! Where the print is sliced a little denser at the top and the corners you can see some facets trying very hard to happen.
The UV cured the resin from underneath too, so that answers whether the underslung tiny LED can cure relatively thick layers of resin.
Other good news, the printer stayed together throughout the entire process, and the resin was in the reservoir was still perfectly good after all the exposure to air and scattered UV. I should point out too that this was printed using short segments rather than dots of resin. That is significantly quicker to do. It would be interesting to compare the dot-by-dot approach for quality at some stage.
Why is it dark grey? It isn't. That's a refraction of the black microscope stand underneath. Doesn't it just highlight all the defects beautifully? The resin is actually quite dense and optically good, which is why I think I need to just make the layer spacing a bit thinner. Could probably print simple optics. I'll finish off with a shot taken straight down onto the frosted glass surface:
