Elegoo Saturn 2 - Do I remove the "Please press firmly on the build plate when tightening the screws" film?
TLDR: Do you remove the film that says “Please press firmly on the build plate when tightening the screws”? YES
I started up a new firmware job at PomSafe a few months ago. Our products are small and have some detailing that isn’t suitable for my normal FDM 3D printers. I decided to finally break down and get a resin printer, which I had been putting off because I wasn’t sure how messy and dangerous the resin would be.
I went with an Elegoo Saturn 2. When I first got it the instructions were good about indicating what plastic needed to be removed on the vat, but there was a piece of plastic on the build plate that said “Please press firmly on the build plate when tightening the screws”. I wasn’t sure if this was supposed to be there or not. I tried picking at it a little with my finger and thumb to see if it was supposed to come off. It didn’t budge and it looked like it had a precision fit so I left it on.
I had some success with printing: the Rook worked, the Cones of Calibration and Ameralabs test print worked. But I had strange issues where my custom STLs weren’t quite sticking to the build plate. I was able to get good prints if I, for example, used a raft and tilted the parts at 45 degrees, and set the early layer burns to 60 seconds, and all kinds of tweaks. To complicate things more, I’ve been trying to print out Orange Pi cases and consumer products, and a lot of the wisdom out there for these is aimed more at the tabletop miniatures crowd.
While trying different fixes I noticed that this film was starting peel off at the edges. So I got back to wondering if this film was supposed to come off even though it wasn’t documented anywhere. Infuriatingly I couldn’t find any pictures of the base of the build plate on Elegoo’s site to see what the installed plate was supposed to look like. Searching on the exact term eventually got me to a few pages on reddit forums where people were talking and saying the film should come off.
So I’m creating this page to hopefully create something definitive that will show high up in search results for others who have this problem. It’s a pretty simple fix, but I thought I should at least write up a story like those annoying recipes so that the search engines take it seriously!
Hope this helps another new Saturn 2 owner out there.